(Spirit Lake)– A special traffic enforcement campaign gets underway today (Mon.) statewide in Iowa and will run through April 10th. Trooper Kevin Krull of the Iowa State Patrol says it will focus on the state’s hands-free law…
“We started that campaign of actually stopping cars with warnings for the first six months and that started last July. When we started that, or since we started that, we’ve given out over 14,000 warnings, stopped cars and given 14,000 warnings statewide for this violation. And since January, so the first three months that we’ve been able to issue an actual citation, we’ve already issued out 3,600 citations, so it’s quite a large number statewide of people that just aren’t understanding just the concept behind that. It’s not a cheap citation, it’s 180 dollars for this fine.”
Krull says the special enforcement is being held in conjunction with the month of April being designated as National Distracted Driving Awareness Month. He says the special campaign is being put on in conjunction with the Iowa Governor’s Traffic Safety Bureau and will involve local law enforcement in addition to the State Patrol…
“We’re going to continue it on. I mean the State Patrol’s very active, as the local officers are as well. This is one of those laws we’ve been asking for and we believe it helped us get under that 300 mark with only 260 deaths last year which was a 27 percent decrease from the previous year. That’s a huge deal. That’s 97 lives that have been spared or the difference of 97 lives. Now we can do better than that, obviously. We’ve still got that many citations being issued, we should be able to get that number down even more if people just all get together and just say you know what, we’re going to put that phone down, we’re going to do the right thing and we’re not going to touch our phone.”
Iowa’s hands-free law took effect July 1st, 2025. Authorities began issuing fines to violators January 1st, 2026.
