NORTH COUNTY : Drunk-Driving Crackdown Nets 39

A first-ever coordinated drunk-driving crackdown in North Orange County resulted in 39 arrests Friday night and early Saturday morning. About 70 police officers in Buena Park, Fullerton, La Habra, Brea and Placentia were assigned to search for drunk drivers. The officers covered about 85 square miles of the county north of the Riverside Freeway. La Habra police arrested 11 people suspected of driving drunk, the highest number among the five departments. Brea police arrested 10 of 3,096 motorists stopped at a sobriety checkpoint. Fullerton police arrested four people, less than a typical holiday weekend night, Sgt. Douglas Cave said Saturday. “We look at this as a success,” Cave said. “The people obviously got the word and stayed off the streets.” Before the crackdown, police distributed 2,500 flyers to bars, restaurants and shopping centers warning of the special police effort. Fullerton made one of the earliest arrests, Lt. Bud Lathrop said. Police arrested a man at noon Friday who apparently had left a holiday office party, he said. “He got an early start,” Lathrop said. “His driving was so alarming, people were calling us . . . from pay phones and car phones. It didn’t take any clever police work to catch him.” In addition to the arrests resulting from the crackdown, four of the nine traffic collisions in the North County area Friday night and Saturday morning ended with a driver being arrested on suspicion of drunk driving, Cave said.