Tulsa Police Use Social Media To Raise Awareness On Speeding Dangers

The Tulsa Police Department said they are seeing more people speeding and those speeds are dangerously fast. The high speeds are leading to more crashes and people dying.

Officer Craig Heatherly works in the Mingo Valley Traffic Unit. He said he stops about 50 people a week and a lot of the time it's for speeding.

TPD has been posting about some of the excessive speeds on Facebook and it's got a lot of people talking.

Officer Heatherly said he hopes those posts encourage people to slow down.

"We wanted to raise a little bit of awareness about what’s going on out there, some of the sanctions that could occur if you’re speeding that fast, and to just to get people to generally slow down as we're going to the 2023 trauma season,” Heatherly said.

Officer Heatherly said we're entering what police call "trauma season," where they see many fatal and near fatal situations on the roads.

He said Tulsa officers wrote more than 19,000 speeding tickets last year and nearly 800 of those were aggravated.

“The aggravated speeding ordinance, which is anything 21 miles per our above the posted speed limit. So, out on the highway that's 65 that starts at 86 miles per hour,” Heatherly said.

He said driving that fast can lead to jail time or worse, hurting or killing yourself or someone else.

If you're driving an excess of 100 miles or over, prosecutors are seeking 48 hours in jail. This is an effort to help people slow down.