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Special to the Journal
As of February 11, ROLLING THUNDER operations in Houston County have officially ended in this ninety-day life-saving traffic safety initiative. Enforcement officers here wrote 267 tickets to drivers who didn’t wear seatbelts and another 263 citations to careless parents who didn’t buckle-up their kids in child safety seats.
“Altogether police ticketed nearly 600 potential crash victims who now get a second chance to save the lives of those they love by simply making sure their safetybelt or child safety seat is buckled” said Director Bob Dallas at the Governor’s Office of Highway Safety (GOHS). “Six hundred Houston County families will now double their chances of surviving a highway tragedy,” said Dallas.
GOHS crash data shows unbuckled drivers and passengers, along with illegal speeders, and drunk drivers are top contributing factors to deadly crashes in Houston County. Houston County’s ranking among the top eleven Georgia counties with the highest percentage of projected fatalities is what brought Operation ROLLING THUNDER to Central Georgia for the last three months.
“The THUNDER Challenge here was the abnormally high rate of traffic crashes and injuries and fatalities for a county and community of this size,” said GOHS Law Enforcement Coordinator Powell Harrelson who organizes the initiatives. “So the enforcement stats from these three months of ROLLING THUNDER show this operation lived up to its zero tolerance reputation for finding the deadliest high-risk drivers.”
That means THUNDER patrols also kept Houston County neighborhood roads safe by catching impaired motorists and high-risk drivers here:
• Sobriety checkpoints sent 285 Houston County drunk drivers to jail.
• Concentrated patrols put the brakes on 311 speeders.
• Roadchecks took 807 uninsured or suspended drivers off Bulloch County roads.
• And in the Crime-Fighting column, TASKFORCE officers recovered 3 stolen vehicles while making 120 drug arrests and 57 felony arrests during 131 THUNDER roadchecks.
• Officers also netted 49 fugitives wanted on outstanding warrants. That’s an average of about one fugitive caught every other day, during three months of OPERATION THUNDER.. And those fugitives were caught behind the wheel, while driving around in Houston County neighborhood traffic-- No detectives assigned, no SWAT Teams deployed, and no bounty hunters collecting cash rewards. Just Troopers, cops, and deputies doing their duty and “looking beyond the traffic stop”.
“And that’s the final answer to all those critics in the community who started out here saying, ‘Why aren’t you guys out there fighting crime? Because in fact we were all along,” said LEC Harrelson. “It’s a sure bet the bad guys don’t ride bicycles to commit crimes in Houston County.. or anywhere in Georgia. They get around in cars here like everyone else. And that’s how we catch them, behind the wheel running to and from the scene.-- So from experience we know local crime stats like those in Houston County usually go down, right along with the crashes and injuries and drunk driving incidents during Operation THUNDER. Sooner or later we either catch local criminals when they’re mobile, or make them too paranoid to leave the house,” said Harrelson, a veteran traffic enforcement officer.
“So once again it’s clear THUNDER is about raising survival rates, not revenue,” said GOHS Director Bob Dallas. Operation Rolling THUNDER represented the best of law enforcement working together to make Houston County and each of its cities safer. Importantly, the number of crimes committed during this period also dropped as a result of deploying THUNDER. Based upon this experience, Houston County can anticipate continued improvement in traffic safety and fewer crimes over the months to come,” said Dallas.
“Our operations model calls for officers to spot the unsafe drivers that made this area a high-crash corridor,” said Centerville Police Capt. Roger Hayes, who served as Law Enforcement Coordinator for the Middle Georgia Traffic Enforcement Network. “Over the past three months the sheriff’s office, police chiefs and state troopers here focused on their crash data, applied best practices and strategically deployed their personnel to enforce traffic safety in the most efficient way possible. The final results of this team effort are phenomenal and speak for themselves: many fewer crashes, fewer injuries and fewer deaths over the prior three months and from the same period last year.”
“Our THUNDER mission was to change high risk driving behaviors and show a significant reduction in traffic fatalities and injuries over the initial three month period,” said GOHS Director Dallas. “But when this TASKFORCE is gone, we want to leave local residents with a legacy of safe driving habits. Houston County traffic enforcement teams must continue to target high crash locations with their own ongoing campaign of concentrated patrols and high visibility roadchecks. Local law enforcement here will have a proven playbook of enforcement strategies to use to sustain their lifesaving highway safety goals. It’s easy to see how the citizens of Houston County will have many reasons to be proud of public safety in their community.”
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