Posted on: Saturday, July 28, 2001

Editorial
Police officers implore: Buckle up your keiki

"It didn't have to be," Maui police Lt. Chuck Hirata said of the young girl without a fastened seat belt. Thrown from the back seat of her car, she's now a quadriplegic.

What makes it doubly worse is that the above quote from Lt. Hirata appeared at the top of an editorial just like this one that appeared three years ago.

Since that editorial appeared, the use of car safety seats for infants and toddlers has dropped significantly. What will it take to make us protect our keiki?

"The toughest thing to swallow is to see a child who didn't have to die, but their parents just didn't take the time to buckle them up properly," said Lt. Ernest Correia, a Big Island traffic officer.

Correia is one who used to doubt the effectiveness of seat belts, but like many officers, he's seen the immediate results of a failure to buckle up at the scene of too many accidents.

Lt. Correia's frustration appeared in the same editorial three years ago. What is there about our day-to-day activities that is so crucial that it leads us to jeopardize the lives, not of ourselves, but of our children?

Amazingly, according to a study by the University of Hawai'i's Department of Urban and Regional Planning, we're doing a much better job of protecting ourselves than protecting our children. More than 80 percent of adults remember to buckle up, while use of car safety seats for little ones fell from 53 percent last year to 43.2 percent this year.

Failing to buckle children up properly ought to be a crime, you say? It is, subject to a $100 fine and, possibly, compulsory safety classes. We'd suggest you save yourself the money — and the possibility of endless heartbreak — by properly buckling up your keiki.