Some see Fresno’s DUI crackdown as a model
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— It’s a Saturday night in Fresno, which means another “bar sting” at another nightclub. This one is at Crossroads, a red-and-white themed bar on North Cedar Street popular with bikers. As closing time nears, undercover police stake out the parking lot and look for departing customers who appear to be drunk. One officer observes a man walking unsteadily as he leaves the bar. When he gets in his SUV and starts to drive off, other officers swoop down on him. The officers find a loaded Glock handgun in the center console. The man’s friend, who owns the SUV, walks over to show the police his concealed weapons permit. But he’s been drinking, too, and the permit is void if he’s intoxicated. They arrest him, too. Fresno may be the toughest city in the nation on drunken drivers. An intoxicated motorist is more likely to run into a police checkpoint in this city of 461,000 than anywhere else in the USA, according to Fresno police. Police sneak into the driveways of convicted drunken drivers to plant Global Positioning System tracking devices on their cars and search their homes for evidence they’ve been drinking. Fresno’s hard-as-nails approach to drunken driving comes at a time when some police, prosecutors, probation officials and traffic safety advocates are calling for stepped-up efforts to reduce the death toll from drunken driving. After declining steadily for nearly 20 years, the number of people killed each year in alcohol-related crashes leveled off — at 16,000 to 17,000 — in the mid-1990s and hasn’t dropped significantly since. Most people who drive drunk don’t get caught. Only about 1 in 50 alcohol-impaired drivers is actually arrested, says Susan Ferguson, senior vice president for research at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a non-profit research organization supported by auto insurance companies. “What it amounts to is an awful lot of people who are driving impaired in this country who have no fear of being arrested,” Ferguson says. Many of those who do get arrested don’t stop driving drunk. About a third of all drivers arrested for drunken driving are repeat offenders, according to Mothers Against Drunk Driving. The group says 50% to 75% of drivers whose licenses are suspended or revoked for DUI continue to drive without a license. Those numbers are unacceptable to some fed-up police, probation officers and prosecutors, who are using increasingly aggressive tactics to reduce drunken driving: •In Nassau County, N.Y., on Long Island, District Attorney Kathleen Rice won a rare murder conviction last month in a drunken-driving case. Insurance salesman Martin Heidgen, 25, was convicted of second-degree murder in the July 2005 deaths of Katie Flynn, 7, and Stanley Rabinowitz, 59, who was driving the limousine that Heidgen struck head-on. Heidgen had been driving the wrong way on Meadowbrook Parkway. Katie and her family were being driven home from a wedding. Heidgen, who faces a maximum prison sentence of 25 years to life, will be sentenced later this month. His attorney says he will appeal. “We would hope that this verdict sends a message that if you drink and drive and kill someone, you will be prosecuted for murder,” Rice said after the conviction. She no longer allows plea deals in drunken-driving cases and plans to use a state grant to buy high-tech alcohol-detecting ankle bracelets for convicted drunken drivers who are required to stay sober as part of their probation. •The Riverside County Probation Department in California this year began tracking up to 130 repeat offenders with a 2-½ ounce tracking device armed with GPS technology. The device, which can be worn as a bracelet or anklet, alerts authorities in less than one minute when a convicted DUI offender enters a bar, says Michael DeGasperin, director of the department. Many of the felony DUI offenders in the cities of Temecula, Murrieta and Perris already wear a similar device, a Secure Continuous Remote Alcohol Monitor (SCRAM) ankle bracelet that measures the alcohol in a person’s system by collecting minute sweat samples. “Both are good deterrents in trying to out-fox the fox,” DeGasperin says. “We want it to be a little intrusive and Big Brother-ish to get them to raise the white flag and come to us to seek help before they’re involved in another accident.” •More than 30 states have enacted additional penalties for so-called “high-risk” drunken drivers, those with a blood-alcohol content of .15% to .20%. The legal limit in all 50 states is .08%. Twenty-eight states assign prosecutors to focus on drunken driving. Five states — Maine, North Carolina, Utah, Virginia and Wisconsin — have lowered the maximum blood-alcohol content for repeat offenders to varying limits below .08%. |