Random DUI stops more effective

[News Flash]

Random DUI stops more effective

Sarasota County Sheriff's Office deputies and North Port Police Department officers spent lot of time and taxpayers' money this past weekend to arrest 10 drivers on charges of driving under the influence and a few more on other charges out of hundreds of cars stopped and inconvenienced at a DUI checkpoint, according to a Herald-Tribune news brief Saturday on the Web and Sunday in print.

In the fight to get drunken drivers off the roads, Florida law-enforcement agencies would likely make far more arrests if they spent their available patrol time roaming the streets, looking for drunken drivers, rather than standing at roadblocks waiting for these drivers to come to them.

Because they are highly visible by design and publicized in advance, roadblocks are all too easily avoided by the chronic alcohol abusers who comprise the core of today's drunken-driving problem.

Conversely, the number of DUI arrests made by roving patrol programs is nearly 10 times the average number of DUIs made by checkpoint programs, according to testimony by a Pennsylvania Department of Transportation official to that state's Supreme Court in 2005.

Sarasota residents and taxpayers would benefit from employing the most effective tactics to catch drunken drivers: roving police patrols.

Source

according to testimony by a Pennsylvania Department of Transportation official

Yeahhhhh, try getting your source a little closer to home next time. I can just imagine the uproar if they had a checkpoint in PA, little horse and buggies waiting in line all night to be checked out.

It's common knowledge that if you allow officers to roam -- instead of clustering them all together at one checkpoint -- then they apprehend more DUIs. This is old news, but it's new news to the public because they never knew that. We've continued doing DUI checkpoints because it has a lot of public-relations (PR) value. It's all about PR!

It is good PR, and frankly it is only once a month or so that they do it, so it's NOT by any means a waste of time. A waste of time is to have those units that are "roaming" around, call the person a cab because they are too lazy to write up a simple DUI.