Kyleigh's Law, which requires young drivers to display red decals on their vehicles to alert police to their age and driver's license status, has been controversial from its start in 2010.
While the underlying goal of trying to prevent accidents involving teen drivers is laudable, critics have been plentiful, fearing the decals would expose young people to predators or police abuse. Lawmakers have even sought to overturn the measure, or at least its decal provision.
Now comes some evidence that is supposed to show that the law is working and should remain intact. But the results of that study are quickly becoming as much an object of dispute as the decals themselves.
In a report published Tuesday in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine, conducted by four researchers from Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, the crash rate for teen drivers was found to have decreased 9 percent when comparing crashes before and after the implementation of Kyleigh's Law on May 1, 2010.
The law, named for Kyleigh D'Alessio, a Long Valley teen killed in a 2006 crash, also requires a driver with a GDL, or graduated driver's license, to adhere to curfews, limits how many other teens can be in the vehicle as passengers and restricts the use of electronic devices while operating a vehicle.
The study used pre- and post-law statistics and trends in determining that the law prevented crashes that would have involved 1,624 teen drivers. Researchers looked at databases from Jan. 1, 2008, to May 31, 2011, in comparing monthly rates of GDL-related citations and crashes for teen drivers in the two years before Kyleigh's Law was implemented and for the year after the law took effect.
The study found the crash rate decreased from a rate of 140.9 per 10,000 drivers before the law took effect, to 128.3 per 10,000 drivers in its aftermath. Researchers concluded that the decals increased the effectiveness of the GDL law.
In addition, researchers found that summonses for GDL violations increased 14 percent the first year after the law took effect. From May 1, 2010, to September, 5,267 summonses were written.
The researchers maintain they were able to filter our other possible explanations for the reduced numbers of crashes - such as the potential effects of other laws. But that strikes us as a bit unrealistic; police, for instance, may have been more strictly enforcing the tighter restrictions of the GDL requirements that are also a part of Kyleigh's Law, independent of the decals themselves.
Police can readily spot some of the GDL violations, and gauge the youth of a driver. While the decal serves as an additional means of identification, we would hope police do not rely solely on those decals; after all, it isn't hard to simply remove the sticker to throw police off the scent. Parents have been known to encourage their children to do just that.
But there's still some encouraging news here. More research is clearly needed -- and the folks at the Children's Hospital plan to do so - but these preliminary findings suggest the decals may be helping to save at least some lives, if not quite so high a number as the report's authors claim. If that's the case, and if fears of predators using the decals to identify targets are proving overblown - and a state attorney general's study in April 2011 found only one such incident reported to police - then there is some cause for opponents to consider softening their resistance.
Besides, is that decal really that much different from a student or a parent putting a "Class of 2013" bumper sticker on their car?