Camp lejeune of a dangerous-driver crack down aimed at those who text, speed, talk on their phones or don’t wear seatbelts on base.The safety campaign has already tagged almost 2,000 drivers with tickets issued by base MPs and infractions carry serious consequences, starting with an automatic one-week suspension of on-base driving privileges. Second-time offenders are suspended for a month, and third-time offenders lose driving privileges for six months. With each offense, points are accumulated toward a one-year suspension.In each case, Defense Department decals are scraped off the vehicle’s windshield.I call it the Aggressive Driver Campaign,” said base commander Col. Dan Lecce, who took over in June and observed what he saw as an accident waiting to happen.
“People were driving way too aggressively and not paying attention,” Lecce said. “We have all these young people attached to these cell phones, talking on them and texting, and my view is you’re going to get somebody killed. So I said we need to crack back on it.”The unforgiving penalties were Lecce’s idea.I hate to say this, but if there are no teeth in the rules and no enforcement mechanism, then they’re not going to work,” he said.The campaign will continue until August, but will be extended if compliance doesn’t increase.If we stop and people go right back to texting while they’re driving and all the other madness, we’ll go right back to this. Because if somebody gets killed because a guy is on a cell and runs somebody over with his car, I view that as my responsibility.Patrols have been increased in hot spots near schools, housing areas being used as cut-throughs, commercial centers and open highways. The stepped-up vigilance has begun to pay off, according to 1st Lt. Christopher Marsh, who said the number of citations being issued is down, from 1,186 in September, when the campaign started, to 786 in November.Word of mouth on the crackdown and its penalties has been a deterrent, especially among the youngest Marines, who are most often stopped.
It’s probably getting pretty big in the ‘lance corporal underground’ right now. It generally relates to a maturity issue,” said Marsh, the officer in charge of special operations for the Provost Marshal.Base MPs issue up to 60 cell phone citations a month, and up to 15 citations monthly for drunken driving. The peak hours for citing drivers, Marsh said, are during morning rush hour and between noon and 2 p.m., a time of day when traffic on base is at its highest.Unless a driver can prove in traffic court that there was a valid reason for breaking the rule, driving privileges are automatically suspended.We’ve had a 10 percent decrease in accidents since the start of the program, which may not look substantial, but I would forecast probably a 20 percent decrease by the midway point,” Marsh said.
