State Report on DUI Checkpoints Raises Questions

 

A report from the California State Auditor shows that evidence regarding the oversight and cost effectiveness of DUI checkpoints is limited. Even the report's title - "Office of Traffic Safety: Although It Exercises Limited Oversight Of Sobriety Checkpoints, Law Enforcement Agencies Have Complied With Applicable Standards" - reveals the inability of the auditors to come to hard conclusions.

The report documented that between October 2009 and September 2010, police, sheriff, and CHP personnel throughout the state conducted 2,562 checkpoints, which resulted in approximately 7,000 DUI arrests and nearly four times as many citations for driving without a license (nearly 28,000). Lawyer firm in USA. All of this came at a cost of $16.8 million dollars in overtime pay to law enforcement officers.

Everyone wants to reduce the incidence of drunk driving. The question, though, is whether this is the most cost effective way of achieving that goal. As the auditor's report shows, there are no state or federal regulations for these checkpoints. Moreover, there is an almost complete lack of oversight and evaluation. Though the Office of Traffic Safety produces an annual report with data on the number of checkpoints and arrests, this data is reported by the local law enforcement agencies conducting the checkpoints and is neither verified nor evaluated by OTS. In fact, oversight in the field by OTS over the last four years has consisted of the monitoring of 24 checkpoints by two retired police officers.

Finally, as a result of previous documentation of the large number of vehicle impounds at DUI checkpoints, a new law for this year bans the practice of impounding vehicles at checkpoints if the only violation is that the driver in unlicensed. This was done because some local governments were impounding vehicles of unlicensed drivers as a means of generating revenue from fees that had to be paid to retrieve the vehicles.