The AAMVA Martha Irwin Distinguished Service Award for Safety, is presented annually to a member law enforcement jurisdiction, or an individual or organization whose primary function is directly associated with highway and traffic safety efforts.
Westphal Receives 2003 Martha Irwin Distinguished Safety Award
Colonel Lonnie Westphal, recently retired Chief of the Colorado State Patrol, was awarded AAMVA’s most prestigious safety award during the closing banquet of the 2003 AAMVA Annual International Conference. The AAMVA Martha Irwin Distinguished Service Award for Safety is presented annually to an individual or member jurisdiction organization whose primary function is directly associated with highway and traffic safety efforts.
Westphal began his career with the Colorado State Patrol as a trooper in 1974. During his leadership with the State Patrol, seat belt usage in Colorado rose from 55 percent to over 73 percent, saving hundreds of lives in the process. Placing a heavy emphasis on enforcement of child restraint systems, Colorado overcame the fact that more than 90 percent of child restraint systems were installed incorrectly by instituting a state wide initiative to train instructors on the proper placement of child safety seats.
Probably Chief Westphal’s greatest legacy has been the reduction of impaired driving crashes and fatalities. Chief Westphal took a proactive approach to the issue of the drinking driver. He started a vigorous DUI enforcement campaign in Colorado that began in 1996 called the Heat-is-On. Since the inception of the enforcement campaign over 25,000 DUI arrests have been made on Colorado roadways saving untold numbers of lives. In an effort to reduce road rage on Colorado highways Westphal developed a free cell phone campaign where motorists could report aggressive drivers directly to the CSP.
To overcome sky rocketing trends of fatalities on stretches of state and federal highways in Colorado, Chief Westphal focused limited CSP resources on traffic safety by deploying officers on some of the most dangerous. This effort has dramatically reversed the deadly spiral of crashes on the targeted road segments and is saving more than one life per week.
Among his many accomplishments, Colonel Westphal is a graduate of the Federal Bureau of Investigation – National Executive Institute and Northwestern University’s Police Leadership Institute. As a former chair of AAMVA’s Police Traffic Services Committee, Westphal currently serves as the 3rd Vice President of the International Association of Chiefs of Police and is a board member for both Mothers Against Drunk Driving and the Century Council, a nonprofit organization dedicated to fighting drunk driving and underage drinking. He also serves as an Executive Board Member of the National Coalition Against Drunk Driving (NCADD).
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Contact: Sheila Prior, (480) 275-4584