SABATTUS — One man drove off shouting “Merry (bleeping) Christmas!” and tried to file a complaint against the officer who’d written him up.

“He wanted me to pull the video to show that he was wearing a seat belt,” Lt. Matt Prince said. So Prince did. “And he wasn’t.”

The ticket stood.

“The lady on Main Street called me every name in the book, said I had it out for her,” Prince said.

That tact didn’t work either.

Forty-nine police departments received nearly $200,000 for extra seat belt enforcement patrols during Maine’s Thanksgiving season, the Click it Or Ticket campaign. Prince’s grant gives his small department 48 extra hours on the road. It hasn’t been hard to spot offenders; he found two Monday morning before leaving the police station parking lot.

But, one of the odd rubs: Officers seem to get more grief over a $70 seat-belt infraction than a speeding ticket that runs twice as much.

“They really pitch a fit" when the fine hits $310, he said. That’s third offense territory.

In 2008, when not wearing a seat belt became a primary, ticketable offense in Maine — police didn’t have to stop a car for a bigger infraction first — they wrote 18,273 summonses for seat belt violations, said Carl Hallman, highway safety coordinator at the Maine Bureau of Highway Safety.

In 2009, it was 15,002 summonses.

“It does save lives,” Hallman said. His department counted 50 people who died in crashes last year who weren’t buckled up.

Most Mainers have been getting the message. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's statistic center put the state’s seat belt use at 72.3 percent in 2004, then 83 percent in 2008.

Prince has divided his officers' special patrols into four-hour blocks, hitting peak commuting hours and the busiest roads in town. They’ll keep at it until Nov. 28, when this campaign ends and another begins, also funded by the NHTSA, with a focus on impaired drivers.

Black seat belts against black coats can sometimes make seat-belt compliance hard to see, as can Suburbans — the belt comes from the seat, not from the side of the vehicle — but otherwise, “it’s pretty easy to spot,” Prince said. He likes patrolling at corners, where there’s often a streetlight, and to take the turn, “You have to slow. I’ll plain as day see it.”

It’s not uncommon, when he does flick on his blue lights, to see the driver’s hand slowly snake toward the belt.

Monday morning, he came up behind a blue truck on Route 126 and a 69-year-old driver who, at first pass, hadn’t been wearing a belt. Stopped along the roadside, he was.

Prince walked out to the driver’s side door in a drizzle before heading back to write the ticket.

“He came clean and told me he tried to put it on (in haste),” Prince said. “He said he usually doesn’t wear it because he forgets but he wears it when his girlfriend's with him. She picks at him.”

That driver was “decent” about getting a $70 ticket, and complimented Prince on his eyesight.

Driving by a business in town, Prince waved at another man on foot, outside his vehicle. The man waved back.

“I wrote him a ticket this morning,” Prince said. “He was a jerk to me, too.”

kskelton@sunjournal.com

Four hours in the life of the Click it Or Ticket campaign

Sabattus police, Monday morning, 8 a.m.-noon

33: Number of traffic stops

17: Number of seat belt summonses

3: Insurance violations found

4: Inspection sticker violations found

1: Calls to selectmen, complaining about police

2: Number of people who have come into the police station since Friday to complain about an officer, claim they had been wrongfully targeted

2: Number of complainees whom the dashboard videotape did not exonerate

SOURCE: Lt. Matt Prince, Sabattus PD

Seat belt facts from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration

13,250: Number of lives saved by having worn a seat belt in a car crash, 2008

4,152: Number of lives NHTSA estimates could have been saved if they'd been wearing belts

231: Number of people killed in nighttime crashes over the long Thanksgiving weekend, 2008

67: Percent of those people who weren't wearing belts