Safety matters this holiday season

With the holidays in full swing, many around Sampson County will be taking to the roadways. As travel increases, so to is activity from law enforcement who said they’ll be extra vigilant in monitoring for any incidents.

“For New Year’s, and Christmas, we have allotted 13 members here to assist during holidays,” First Sgt. Kevin Pearson, N.C. State Highway Patrol, said. “One of those members is actually in training, so we’re going to have 10 of those allotted that will be working all throughout the holidays.”

Pearson said it will be boots on the ground that entire time and they’ll be running the gambit across all roads to ensure safe travel.

“Everybody’s going to be out there, and we’re going to be doing our normal thing,” he said. “We’ll be doing checkpoints, aggressively enforcing DWI laws, will be on the interstate, so we’ll be out and about all days.”

Pearson and the Highway Patrol won’t be alone in their efforts as both Clinton Police and Sampson Sheriff’s Departments are increase their efforts.

“We’ll be increasing our saturated patrols on our main thoroughfares, where most of our traffic could be coming in and out of the city,” Clinton Police Chief Anthony Davis said. “And, we’ll be stepping up some checkpoints during the holiday season.

“The effectiveness of that itself is because we were getting even more on routine patrols,” he added. “On the weekend, we were getting between three and six every weekend. Obviously, during the holiday season, you got more parties and that type of thing going on, numbers are probably going to increase.”

Lt. Marcus Smith of the Sampson County Sheriff’s Office, said the same, noting it’ll be business as usual, though he did leave a word of caution for potential suspects.

“We’re always proactively hunting down drunk drivers and DWI’s, so it’s gonna be no different,” Smith said. “We’re gonna be out there, we’re gonna be on patrol and we’re gonna be proactively looking for those offenders driving this holiday.

“Not just for the holidays, but any day,” Smith continued. “So, if I left one message for people traveling this holiday I’d say, you need to just stay off the roads, if you’re gonna be intoxicated. We’re out there, we’re proactively looking for you and eventually you’re going to get caught.”

“Of course, obviously, the more numbers we have out there, the more chances we are to come across someone breaking the law,” he added.

Even with increased numbers of law enforcement, drivers should air on the side of caution, especially heading into the holidays and at the end of a deadly year that had a high amount of driving related fatalities.

“As of now, in 2024, and some of these are like two people got killed in one crash, or maybe even three, so that’s why the number might be so high,” Pearson said. “But, we’ve had 21 that’ve been killed in the Samson County. We’re currently waiting on blood results to conclude how many are specifically just drunk driving , but, I can attest that we have two for sure due to drunk driving.”

As for how that number compared to other parts of the state, Pearson said he was unsure as his focus was here at home.

“We don’t track comparisons, DOT probably does at the district level, but we don’t track that because my concern is Sampson County,” explained Pearson. “What happens in Johnston or Wake County, that’s on them. I’m sure somewhere in the state they compare and contrast the different numbers but we don’t do that here.”

That said, while 2024 had it’s fair share of fatalities, the outcome was better.

“Just put it perspective — right now we’ve had 21 fatalities, and this is from Jan. 1 to Dec. 31,” he said. “But, last year, we had 28, so we’re actually down a little bit.”

In the hopes of keeping that trend going, Pearson left a final message of safety and advice for all those hitting the road the rest of 2024.

”I just spoke about this recently on JW Simmons ‘We should know’ radio show,” he said. “In the interview with him, my biggest message to people out there was to plan accordingly and plan ahead of time. You know what you’re going to be getting into, so just make the proper preparations for that. If you know you’re going to be drinking and driving, always make sure you have a plan B to get home because you’re not going to be able to drive.”