More than 6,700 tickets for seat-belt violations been written since a new seat-belt law went into effect last month.

The number is 4,165 more than the one-month period before the law kicked in, and advocates predict the numbers will increase as police tighten enforcement.

From Dec. 9 — when the new seat-belt law went into effect — through Jan. 6, South Carolina Highway Patrol troopers wrote 6,712 tickets for seat-belt violations. From Nov. 9 to Dec. 8, troopers wrote 2,547 seat-belt tickets.

“The day the law went into effect, we had no expectations on how many we would write or how many we were going to write,” spokesman Sid Gaulden said.

It has been a crime to not wear a seat belt in South Carolina since 1989. But law enforcement officers could ticket you only if they first pulled you over for some other offense, such as speeding or expired tags.

That changed Dec. 9, when a new law allowed police to stop drivers for not wearing a seat belt.

Not all of the 6,712 tickets were primary enforcement tickets, Gaulden said, but he could not provide a breakdown of how many were secondary violations. He also could not provide a breakdown by area or by race.

The law included a provision for tracking race because of concerns about racial profiling.

Advocates say the number of tickets could increase in the coming months because law enforcement officers gave drivers time to adjust to the new law.

Max Young, director of the Office of Highway Safety at the Department of Public Safety, said law enforcement in general “probably did give motorists a period to get familiar with the law and be a little more lenient than they are going to be in the future.”

That has been the case in Lexington County, where Sheriff James Metts said most tickets have been warnings. He said deputies are giving drivers 90 days to get familiar with the law before they start writing more tickets.

“What we find, basically, in polling our supervisors, is that in the urban area there is more usage, and we are writing less tickets than in the rural area,” Metts said.

Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott said through a spokesman that his department tries not to write tickets for seat-belt violations, but rather issues “warnings and education information, when possible.”

Joel Sawyer, spokesman for Gov. Mark Sanford, said the governor would like to see “actual compliance rates” before passing judgment on the law’s impact. Sanford allowed the bill to become law without his signature.

“These numbers don’t definitely say that the law has influenced behavior,” Sawyer said.

Staff writer Lisa Michals contributed to this article. Reach Beam at (803) 771-8405 or abeam@thestate.com.