VALDOSTA – The Lowndes County Sheriff’s Office is one of 17 law enforcement agencies in Georgia that received a Highway Enforcement of Aggressive Traffic (HEAT) grant from the Governor’s Office of Highway Safety.
LCSO used the funding for three deputies, equipment and vehicles.
Sheriff Prine will presented the new HEAT vehicles to his deputies Thursday morning during an informal ceremony.
The vehicles were purchased locally from Langdale Ford. They are 2016 Ford Taurus PPV (Police Pursuit Vehicle) sedans. The cars were outfitted with all the latest safety features like AWD (All Wheel Drive), back-up cameras & alarms and a powerful twin-turbo engine. The vehicles are painted Blue Jean metallic with silver GOHS emblems to conform to HEAT requirements.
The goal of the H.E.A.T. program is to combat crashes, injuries and fatalities caused by impaired driving and speeding, while also increasing seatbelt use and educating the public about traffic safety and the dangers of DUI.
The Lowndes County Sheriff’s Office H.E.A.T Unit will use the grant from GOHS to develop and implement strategies to reduce local traffic crashes due to aggressive and dangerous driving behaviors.
“Agencies like the Lowndes County Sheriff’s Office receive this H.E.A.T. grants because they have showed a particular dedication to protecting their citizens from impaired drivers,” said GOHS Director Harris Blackwood. “This dedication is crucial because alcohol-related crash deaths still account for 25 percent of traffic fatalities in Georgia.”
“Joining forces with the Governor’s Office of Highway Safety will augment the protection provided to the driving population of Lowndes County,” said Lowndes County Sheriff Chris Prine. “There has been an unacceptable nineteen traffic fatalities in Lowndes County in 2015. It becomes personal when we have 19 people who will never go home to their family.”
As law enforcement partners in the Operation Zero Tolerance DUI and Click It Or Ticket seatbelt campaigns, the Lowndes County Sheriff’s Office will also conduct mobilizations throughout the year in coordination with GOHS’s year-round waves of high visibility patrols, multi-jurisdictional road checks and sobriety checkpoints.
