CHP’s One for the Road Sniffs Drunk Drivers

It was just after the Angels’ home game Friday night when California Highway Patrol officers Mike Clare and Alfredo Perez noticed a beige Nissan pickup truck swerving on the Orange Freeway.

They followed the erratic trail for about two minutes. Suspecting that the driver was under the influence of alcohol, they flashed their patrol lights and pulled him over just past the Nutwood Avenue exit.

After a brief discussion, the 53-year-old driver from West Covina was asked to step out of his truck and perform the usual field sobriety tests. But before the officers made their final judgment, he was offered one last exercise to prove he wasn’t drunk: a breath test.

As of Friday, CHP officers throughout the state were permitted to use hand-held testers to detect alcohol on drivers’ breath as part of their field sobriety determinations.

“It’s just another tool in helping us get drunk drivers off the road,” said Clare, who arrested the man after the device showed that he had a blood-alcohol level of about 0.11, above the legal limit of 0.08, which was recently lowered from 0.10.

Like other field sobriety tests, the device, which has been used successfully since 1983 in Virginia, Maryland and Idaho, will be used only to help officers determine whether there is probable cause that a person has been drinking excessively, authorities said.

“The readings we take from them will not be admissible in court,” CHP spokeswoman Angel Johnson said.

Made in St. Louis, Mo., by Intoximeters Inc., the ALCO-Sensor III costs about $440 per unit. Hundreds of the devices have been distributed to CHP officers throughout the state.

Field soberity tests can be refused. Under the state Vehicle Code, only “implied consent” tests are mandatory. These require any licensed driver to submit to a breath, blood or urine sample at the CHP station if he or she is legally asked to do so. Refusal to take one of the mandatory tests could result in license revocation.

Drivers who refuse field sobriety tests are taken in for one of the mandatory tests, authorities said.

When the truck driver was asked to blow into the on-the-spot breath tester, he did not hesitate.

“I don’t think I’m drunk,” he said after the test showed him intoxicated and he sat handcuffed in the back of the patrol car. “I just had a couple of beers at the Angels game.”

Ever since the legal blood-alcohol limit was lowered in January from 0.10 to 0.08--the figures reflect the percentage of alcohol in the blood--more drivers are being picked up for driving under the influence, and many them don’t think that they are intoxicated, officials said.

Drunk driving arrests this year in Santa Ana are up 26.3% over the same period in 1989, and similar increases have occurred throughout the county, authorities said.

The CHP office in Santa Ana, which was given 14 of the devices, will keep two of them at truck-scale stops along the Riverside Freeway. The devices will be helpful in 1992, when the blood-alcohol limit for commercial drivers will be lowered to 0.04, Johnson said, because detecting a person with that blood-alcohol level could be difficult without the devices.

Before the CHP started its program Friday, the Ventura Police Department was the only other law enforcement agency in California to use hand-held breath testers, Johnson said.

“Ventura P.D. found it to be a very useful tool,” she said. “Very accurate.”

When the truck driver was taken by the CHP officers to Orange County Jail for his mandatory test, he chose the official breath analyzer test, which tagged his blood-alcohol level at 0.12 and 0.11 in two tests.

Later in the night, the officers were given another chance to use their new tool. This time, the recipient was an obviously impaired driver who had crashed his Toyota pickup into a guardrail near the Riverside Freeway-Orange Freeway interchange. After failing the other field tests, he blew into the breath tester, scoring 0.12.