Car Seat Crackdown : Safety: South Gate police cite 140 drivers who don’t have children properly restrained. Authorities say the law is often broken throughout Southland.

Wendy Diaz was in tears. There she was, standing on the sidewalk, her 7-year-old sister tugging at her hand, her 4-month-old baby, Joshua, rocking forlornly in his car seat.

Diaz, 17, had been nabbed Tuesday in an unusual checkpoint--one designed to snare drivers who fail to buckle children into car seats.

Because the car seat harness tended to jam, Diaz hadn’t buckled up her young son as she drove to her Lynwood home after attending high school and picking up the children from the sitter’s house.

South Gate police caught her and slapped her with a $271 ticket. And they didn’t stop there: Because she had no driver’s license, they impounded her car and planned to charge her $140 to retrieve it.

“It’s not fair,” Diaz sobbed.

Among the 140 or so drivers cited Tuesday, emotional reactions were common. But law enforcement officials and child safety advocates say there is a powerful reason for such tactics: During a five-year period ending in 1992, 360 children under the age of 4 were killed in California car accidents. Of those deaths, 84% would not have occurred if an adult had correctly buckled up the child, experts say. An unrestrained child in the front seat is three times as likely to be killed or seriously injured in an accident as a properly restrained child sitting in the rear of the car, according to the Department of Transportation.

The state’s child restraint law, which went into effect in 1983, was strengthened two years ago with higher fines. A number of police departments are getting tough on violators. In addition to South Gate, checkpoints have been staged recently in Long Beach, Torrance, Signal Hill and Seal Beach.

Some cities, such as South Gate, allow violators to pay $25 for a two-hour child safety class instead of coming up with the fine.

Police say drivers throughout Southern California are routinely flouting the law, which requires them to use a safety seat for any children under 4 and weighing less than 40 pounds.

“In this area, the statistics make me sick--probably more than 50% of drivers who have children here are not using child seats,” said Field Training Officer Keith Hupp of the South Gate Police Department.

Of those who do have car seats, about 70% don’t use them correctly, Hupp said. Babies were not strapped into their seats--or they were strapped in loosely. They were facing the wrong way or plunked down in a seat that was the wrong size. Straps were improperly adjusted or the seat was inadequately anchored.

“It’s a major problem,” said Stephanie Tombrello, executive director of SafetyBeltSafe U.S.A., a safety advocacy organization. “The most important thing is to use a safety seat, use it every time, and use it 100% correctly.”

In a survey, Tombrello said, her national organization found that 40% of drivers had made four errors in the way they buckled their child into a seat.

Hoping to improve their community’s safety track record, South Gate police obtained a $140,000 grant from the state’s Office of Traffic Safety to conduct a series of checkpoints over a one-year period. Twelve checkpoints will be the standard road blocks to catch drunk drivers; the other 12 will be to snare drivers with improperly harnessed youngsters.

South Gate police issued 122 violations to drivers during the five-hour checkpoint.

Cynthia Baynori, 21, was one of them. Her 3-year-old was not in a car seat and her 1-year-old’s car seat faced the wrong direction (babies under 20 pounds should face the rear). But Baynori took it in good stride and applauded the police effort.

“If we don’t protect ourselves, somebody has to,” said Baynori, of Huntington Park, one of 30 motorists whose car was impounded Tuesday for the unrelated violation of driving without a license. “It’s something some people think is unnecessary; they say (an accident) won’t happen to me. But in an accident, mostly the victims are kids.”

Most drivers offered a range of excuses for not using car seats. Martha Saucedo, 20, of Gardena said there was no room in the car for her mother, father and five car seats for the children (two of whom were hers). Francisco Garcia, 23, of South Gate said he had to send money to Mexico for an emergency and had no time to haul the car seat from his apartment to the car.

Richard Flores said he was taking a friend with a sick, 1-month-old baby to the hospital. After Flores and his friend waited for an hour sitting on the curb, South Gate police took them to the hospital. Hupp explained that officers had offered to call an ambulance but Flores turned it down. The police took them as quickly as they could, he said.

Several said they had no money. Others, such as 29-year-old Josephina Rivera, simply did not know that a 3-year-old required a car seat.

Some thought that a short trip wouldn’t endanger their children.

When Nancy Hernandez’s brother called and asked if she could drop off lunch, she packed up some leftovers from dinner and piled her four children into her car, heading along Long Beach Boulevard a few blocks to where her brother worked.

“You figure you are just going a few blocks,” sighed the 27-year-old South Gate woman, acknowledging she had made a mistake, “but that’s all it takes, going around the corner or around a street.”