Police, Taxi Services Brace for New Year’s Deadly Traditions : Holiday: Extra officers will be on patrol and free rides will be available to counteract celebratory gunfire and drunk drinking.

Police and volunteer taxi services are braced again this year for the New Year’s Eve traditions they would wish away if they could: heavy drinking and gunfire.

“It’s absolutely asinine to be shooting guns,” Santa Ana Police Sgt. Bob Clark said. Yet it happens every year, as police departments around the county await the dozens--if not hundreds--of calls about shots fired at midnight to herald the new year.

Last New Year’s Eve, for example, police received 209 reports of gunfire in Santa Ana alone. But it “happens in the Anaheim Hills, and it happens in the barrio,” Anaheim Police Sgt. Joe Vargas said. “It’s not relegated to any specific area.”

Every bullet that goes up also comes down, and with lethal velocity.

“It’s not quite revelry when someone gets injured,” Clark said.

In Santa Ana, police and volunteers this month distributed more than 5,000 multilingual fliers warning residents of the dangers of celebratory gunfire. And that Police Department on Sunday will put an additional 16 officers on the streets beginning about 7 p.m.

Extra police on patrol in every area of the county will be watching not only for random gunfire but for drivers who should not have gotten behind the wheel.

To help keep drunk drivers off the streets, some businesses will offer free nonalcoholic drinks to designated drivers.

And the Boys Clubs of America will provide free rides in South County through its volunteer high school student drivers. Prime Time Shuttle will offer free services that night depending upon availability.

But Yellow Cab and Coast Cab, which used to offer free taxi service to customers at bars and hotels, will not do so this year. The free transportation was previously sponsored by breweries, which have decided not to pay for them this year.

The Boys Club of America’s Safe Rides are available between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. by calling (800) 273-RIDE. Prime Time Shuttle may be reached at (800) 262-7433.