DUI checkpoints questioned

<p>Editor: Petaluma police spent a lot of officers’ time and taxpayers’ money last weekend to arrest four drunken drivers out of more than 1,576 cars stopped and inconvenienced at a DUI checkpoint. That is a meager 0.03 percent success rate.</p><!-- Nothing to do. The paragraph has already been output --><p>In the fight to get drunken drivers off the roads, California’s 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 that comprise the core of today’s drunken driving problem.</p><p>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.</p><p>Petaluma-area residents and taxpayers would benefit from employing the most effective tactics to catch drunken drivers: roving police patrols.</p><p>Sarah Longwell, managing director,</p><p> American Beverage Institute, Washington, D.C.</p>