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Pricey St. Patrick's Day Publicity Stunt

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By SARAH LONGWELL

Special To The Tampa Tribune

Published: March 17, 2009

As St. Paddy's Day revelers get ready to don shamrock sunglasses and dye their beer green, Florida police are making some preparations of their own.

As usual, law enforcement agencies will pour scarce resources into anti-drunk driving efforts by setting up roadside sobriety checkpoints. Unfortunately, experience suggests that those resources will be going to waste.

By putting resources into sobriety checkpoints, police officers will miss the opportunity to catch the majority of drunk and other dangerous drivers. In most cases, statistics show these roadblocks catch only one or two - and often zero - drunk drivers, while inconveniencing hundreds or even thousands of responsible drivers.

Checkpoints in California, Florida, New Jersey and Virginia failed to catch a single drunk driver over the Christmas and New Year's holidays. One of the most glaring examples was a checkpoint in California that stopped 2,600 motorists and caught zero drunk drivers. (Even the Sacramento Kings of the National Basketball Association have a better record.)

The numbers speak for themselves: 15 roadblocks reportedly stopped over 13,000 drivers and caught 18 drunk drivers. That is a 0.1 percent success rate.

You may be thinking: "Good. That means 18 dangerous drivers were taken off the road." True, but what if those same police officers could have removed 180 drunk drivers from the roads instead?

A 10-fold increase in DUI arrests is possible by shifting enforcement resources to roving patrols. Instead of passively waiting for offenders to show up, when police officers actively seek out drunk and dangerous drivers they are nearly 10 times as effective, according to testimony by a Pennsylvania Department of Transportation official.

This isn't just a meaningless statistic. Consider Delaware: Over the holiday season, state police arrested 30 drunk drivers at sobriety checkpoints. During that same time, 276 drunk drivers were taken off the roads by roving patrols. That's over 800 percent more drunk driving arrests.

Checkpoints are ineffective in part because they are so easy to avoid. These roadblocks are highly visible by design and publicized in advance (a requirement in most states). Friends send text messages to warn each other. New iPhone and GPS applications even alert users to checkpoint locations. It's easy for chronic drunk drivers to take a different route home. Only the dumbest of the bunch get caught at roadblocks.

What Floridians are paying for, then, is little more than an expensive publicity stunt.

Checkpoints typically cost taxpayers about $10,000 a pop. On the other hand, roving patrols, also known as saturation patrols, are a cheap and effective alternative. Additional patrols typically cost about $300 each.

Patrols offer even more bang for the buck because in addition to stopping drunk drivers, they also catch drivers engaging in any number of other dangerous activities.

Think about the crazy behavior you see on the roads every day: sports cars whizzing past on the right, commuters talking on a cell phone while speeding, road rage during rush hour.

Here's something you probably didn't know: Statistics show that talking on a cell phone, driving while drowsy and traveling a mere 7 mph above the speed limit are all riskier than driving with a BAC (blood alcohol concentration) of 0.08 percent, the legal arrest threshold in Florida.

But sobriety checkpoints won't catch drivers who are speeding, swerving, texting or driving aggressively. What they will do is waste scarce taxpayer dollars, inconvenience thousands of responsible drivers and fail to stop the most dangerous chronic drunk drivers.

This St. Paddy's Day, Florida police ought to take heed of the lessons we've learned every other holiday season and forego sobriety checkpoints for a strategy that is proven to be far more successful: roving patrols.

Sarah Longwell is the managing director of the American Beverage Institute in Washington, D.C., an association of restaurants committed to the responsible serving of adult beverages.

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