A better way to fight drunk driving

By SARAH LONGWELL

SPECIAL TO THE VINDICATOR

When most of us think of the holidays, we think of gathering together in the company of friends and family, perhaps drinking eggnog and exchanging hastily selected gifts (oooh, a McDonald’s gift card). These days, however, that glass of eggnog (assuming it’s the real stuff) could get you in serious trouble. That’s because during the holiday season, sobriety checkpoints will be as ubiquitous as fruitcake at holiday parties.

“Checkpoints,” you say? “Like they had at the Berlin Wall?” Not exactly. That one was fixed, whereas these are entirely random. The police will set up roadblocks on public streets from which they will indiscriminately stop drivers, shine flashlights in their faces and assess their level of sobriety.

However, they will no longer simply be checking to ensure that drivers are below the legal limit of .08 percent blood alcohol concentration (BAC). Many law enforcement agencies have adopted the notion favored by the Ohio State Highway Patrol: “There is no absolute ‘legal limit’ except ‘zero.’” Not drunk driving, but any drinking and driving could be enough for an arrest.

The problem with such policy is that it doesn’t target the high BAC drivers who cause the vast majority of alcohol-related traffic fatalities. Instead it targets you — the caroling, gift-giving, eggnog-sipping, upright citizen who drinks moderately and responsibly before driving.

The deeply frustrating thing about these checkpoints is that there is a more effective, less intrusive alternative. A Pennsylvania Department of Transportation official testified in that state’s Supreme Court that roving police patrols catch 10 times as many drunk drivers as roadblocks. That’s because they are designed to find and pull over drivers who are truly impaired and thus a real hazard to themselves and others on the road. Checkpoints, by contrast, simply pick up whoever wanders through, even if they are well below the legal limit of .08 percent.

Avoiding roadblocks

Meanwhile, a National Highway Traffic Safety Administration report also found that roadblocks are not effective at catching “chronic drunk drivers,” because they have learned how to avoid the publicized areas where roadblocks are set up — something innocent and responsible adults would never think of doing.

The problem is that, despite the evidence that roadblocks don’t catch drunk drivers, the federal government is “bribing” local municipalities with extra funds to keep checkpoints in business. Apparently, the federal government would rather look like it’s doing something to curb drunken driving than put their efforts into tactics that, though less visible, actually catch drunks. Your tax dollars at work.

Funding for roadblocks and increased pressure by federal authorities to promote “zero tolerance” policies has been ongoing for some time now. The result? Reductions in alcohol-related fatalities have stalled over the past several years. The shift away from focused attempts to catch drunk drivers to broader policies that target everyone who drinks and drives has yielded little result and caused a great deal of unnecessary trouble for many innocent citizens.

In fact, according to the latest NHTSA data, when you divide the nation between those states that use roadblocks and those that don’t, you find that states relying exclusively on roving patrols to catch drunk drivers averaged 7 percent fewer alcohol-related fatalities than those that used roadblocks.

Here’s a modest proposal for this holiday season: End the intimidating sobriety field tests for thousands of responsible holiday revelers who simply enjoyed some eggnog. Targeted enforcement — not roadblocks designed to snare the wrong people — saves lives. Though some of us may bristle at the intrusiveness of roadblocks, the real offense is that they’re being done at the expense of far more effective tactics. Considering the scarce resources we have to fight the deadly problem of drunken driving, we should all be outraged that PR campaigns are taking priority over actually getting drunk drivers off the roads.

X 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.