Once the business council passes a law, it’s considered the law of the reservation. But awareness and enforcement of the law come later. The best way to create awareness is to get the word out about the law change. See Module 6 – Create a data-driven awareness campaign for more informationon how to do that. And the best way to get the law enforced is to strategize to include law enforcement officers, which we will cover in the next section.
My experience (Rebecca):
Obviously, on the day the law was adopted on the Colville Reservation only a select few realized something had changed. Thankfully, the media campaign from the comment period was still running strong, so awareness of car seat safety was increasing. Yet few expected to have car seat usage enforced.
In retrospect we should have implemented immediate media efforts such as PSAs, posters, billboards, informing the community of this new change in law and the consequences for drivers. We did later modify the media campaign to focus exclusively on educating the public to the consequences of failing to use appropriate car seats.