Fishy Letter to Editor: Driver checkpoints yield few arrests

Is it just me or is it strange to you that an alcohol-industry executive would write a letter to the editor about not doing DUI checkpoints and encouraging doing more roving patrols? What could be her motive? Getting more of her clients (bars/restaurants/stores) customers arrested? Hmmmmm.

Here’s the letter:

Chula Vista police spent a lot of officers’ time and taxpayers’ money on a recent weekend to arrest just seven drunk drivers out of 518 cars stopped and inconvenienced at a DUI checkpoint (“2-day police checkpoint nets seven DUI arrests,” March 24). That is a meager 1.35 percent success rate.

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In the fight to get drunk drivers off the roads, California law enforcement agencies would likely make far more arrests if they spent their available patrol time roaming the streets looking for drunk 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.

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

SARAH LONGWELL
Managing Director
American Beverage Institute