‘Operation Hands Free’ brings awareness to distracted driving
HAMILTON COUNTY, Tenn. (WDEF) – Tennessee law enforcement kicked off Distracted Driving Awareness Month with Operation Hands Free.
“April is an important month for us. We are hitting our roadways, to start looking for motorists who continue to use their telephones in their hand, continue to talk on their phones, and continue to text on their phones.”
Operation Hands Free is a statewide bus tour that cracks down on those violating Tennessee’s Hands-Free Law.
Steve Dillard with the Tennessee Highway Safety Office believes Tennessee has great laws in place for motor vehicle safety.
However, “the bad part is once you take your focus off the road to that telephone. Before you know it, you get so focused on that message that you do not realize the vehicle in front of you just slammed their brakes and stopped at a red light, or some other traffic violation,” Dillard said.
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, more than 3,000 people were killed by distracted drivers in 2022.
Chattanooga Police Chief Celeste Murphy says it is important to raise awareness on distracted driving.
“As you can see from the stats that were given earlier, it leads to accidents with serious injury, even including death, in some cases,” said Chief Murphy. “Statewide, we are seeing hundreds of violations of distracted driving behaviors, and we want to bring that to awareness because it’s avoidable.”
The goal of Operation Hands Free is to make sure the public is safe, and their phones are put away.
Chief Murphy urges people to be more cautious while driving.
“Whether it be in your car, whether it is having an animal in your car that is not really restrained, your children in your car that are not restrained, or putting on that makeup before you rush into that first meeting at work. We want to make sure that we put something in folks’ mind and seed in folks’ mind to be a little bit better keepers of our behavior when we are driving,” Murphy concluded.
