Drunk-Driver Checkpoints Expected Back for Holidays

Orange County drivers will probably find those once-familiar drunk-driver checkpoints cropping up just in time for the holidays.

Law enforcement agencies say the “sobriety checkpoints” will probably be reinstituted around the state as a result of Thursday’s ruling by the state Supreme Court upholding the legality of the roadblocks.

The blocks were stopped last year after a state appeals court ruled unconstitutional an Anaheim police officer’s arrest of a drunk driver at a checkpoint. That court ruled that such roadblocks are an illegal intrusion into the privacy of citizens.

“We’ve been waiting for the decision,” said Capt. Martin Mitchell, acting police chief of Anaheim. “We’ll just pull our signs out and dust them off. We’ll be right back in the market again.”

California Highway Patrol spokesman Mike Maas said: “This decision has paved the way for all law enforcement agencies to reinstitute the sobriety checkpoints, and we will be shooting for the holidays.”

“I’m disappointed, but not surprised,” said Orange County deputy public defender Thomas Havlena, whose office last year won the reversal of the 1984 Anaheim checkpoint drunk-driving conviction before the Fourth District Court of Appeal in Santa Ana. “It’s another erosion of our Fourth Amendment rights. I don’t think it’s a necessary way to enforce the laws.”

A review of the Anaheim case is pending before the state Supreme Court, which had previously ordered the appellate court decision to be published, Havlena said.

“I’m anticipating they will send the (Anaheim) case back to the Fourth District Court to be decided again in light of the Ingersoll decision,” he said, referring to the Anaheim case.

Orange County CHP officers--along with police departments in the cities of Anaheim, Brea, Huntington Beach and Laguna Beach--had set up checkpoints before the appellate court ruled the stops unconstitutional.

Now, red-and-white “Saturday Night Alive” signs announcing the checkpoints will be reposted quickly at the entrances to Laguna Beach, Laguna Beach Police Chief Neil Purcell said: “It sends out a message to our community, especially the bars.”

It is hard to measure how effective the stops are in keeping drunk drivers off the road, Purcell said, but he added that calls to his department’s Tipsy Taxi service “went way up” on checkpoint nights. Year-round, inebriated callers in the Laguna Beach area can get a free ride home in a patrol car, he said.

Deterrence Is Goal

However, deterrence, not arrests, is what the checkpoints are chiefly designed to accomplish, police said. For seven days during the New Year’s holiday in 1985, Anaheim police stopped 6,934 motorists at checkpoints, but arrested just 44.

“I think the deterrent is what we’re really after, not how many people we can put in jail,” Anaheim’s Mitchell said. “But it certainly has a psychological effect on people.”

“In law enforcement, there is disagreement as to the effectiveness of these checkpoints,” said Commander William Booth, spokesman for the Los Angeles Police Department.

“At LAPD we’re sort of in the middle on the issue. But we think the decision is a good one. . . . We see a value to them, especially during the holidays.”

Booth said LAPD will probably begin using the sobriety checkpoints during the holiday season.

He stressed, however, that LAPD doesn’t see the checkpoints as “the total answer.”

LAPD stopped 23,099 vehicles at the checkpoints in 1985-86, arresting 606 people for driving under the influence, Booth said. However, alcohol-related traffic fatalities continued to rise during that time.

The arrest rate strikes at the heart of one of the principal legal issues before the court: whether it is reasonable to subject large numbers of presumably law-abiding citizens to roadblocks in order to arrest a relative handful of drunk drivers.

Data cited by the three dissenting justices in Thursday’s opinion, for example, said that in Missouri, 831 innocent drivers were subjected to an invasion of their privacy from roadblocks for every drunk driver arrested.

The CHP, one of the most enthusiastic users of the checkpoints, screened 107,055 vehicles at 164 checkpoints on major thoroughfares and freeway access roads from December, 1984, to August, 1986, Maas said. During that time, officers made 931 arrests for driving under the influence.

However, law enforcement spokesmen said the checkpoints are perhaps most effective not because of drunk-driving arrests, but because they raise public awareness about problems associated with drunk driving. Many agencies also pass out information to drivers screened at the checkpoints.

CHP spokesman Ken Daily said that on nights that the checkpoints were in place, considerably fewer drunks were arrested on the roads and the number of accidents decreased.

“The number of drunk arrests went way down when we publicized ahead of time,” he said. “It’s more of a psychological weapon, a deterrent. It seems to work real well.”

Standard procedures have been set up for the checkpoints by the state Attorney General and the National Transportation Safety Board. Those procedures call for law enforcement agencies to notify the public of the checkpoints in advance and to screen just a percentage of the drivers--about one in five--to avoid long delays.