DUI Trailer May Help Drive Home a Valuable Lesson

Beginning this month, Santa Ana police are ditching the boring high school assemblies they used for years to fight underage drunk driving. Instead, they’ll rely on a trailer stuffed with state-of-the-art driving simulators that officers hope students will find more engaging -- and effective.

“They need to see the dangers firsthand to understand that when they drink, they’re really not in control,” said Sgt. Dan McDermott, a motorcycle traffic officer. “We know we can’t get to everybody, but we want to be more effective with the kids we do see.”

McDermott, one of four officers who will run the program in addition to their regular duties, plans to drive the 40-foot DUI Education Trailer to high schools and community colleges. He hopes to get about 200 students each month inside to use simulators intended to give students the experience of driving drunk through the streets of San Francisco.

Ten students at a time can use the simulators: $25,000 worth of donated computers equipped with a video game called “Midtown Madness,” steering wheels and gas and brake pedals.

A computer network puts everyone on the same set of streets, along with screaming pedestrians who fling themselves out of harm’s way whenever a car gets too close.

Students first practice driving with normal settings to get the feel of starting, turning and stopping. Then the officers apply options that alter the game so the cars handle as if their drivers were drunk.

The idea is to show users that no matter how much control they think they have, police are likely to notice the swerving, drifting and curb-hopping that can accompany a six-pack.

Santa Ana modeled its trailer, funded by corporate donations and a state traffic safety grant, partly after a Santa Monica program. The Santa Monica trailer has been taken to schools and senior centers in the Westside, including Culver City, Beverly Hills and West Hollywood, for almost a year, traffic division Sgt. Jay Trisler said.

Santa Monica’s trailer contains six computer simulators and a room for students to watch videos. Outside the trailer, officers give visitors field sobriety tests with and without goggles that give wearers skewed vision similar to that experienced by people under the influence.

“We hit them three different ways, and it gets them much more involved than those big school assemblies with hundreds of kids,” Trisler said.

Although it also offers videos, simulators and drunk-vision goggles, Santa Ana’s trailer is configured differently and is decorated with a distinctly Orange County flavor. Students from the Orange County High School of the Arts, just down the street from the police station, designed the posters that hang above the computers, including one depicting a crushed car in a graveyard.

A graphic design student at Chapman University created the look for the trailer’s exterior, featuring pictures of motorcycle officers giving sobriety tests and text providing legal tidbits about DUIs: Fines can exceed $10,000, and probation can last three years.

Panels on the side of the trailer roll up to reveal large television screens and giant speakers that McDermott plans to use for playing motocross and skateboard videos each time he pulls up to a school.

Those videos are meant only to attract attention. The real message is delivered by a video the department produced just for use in the trailer. The 14-minute video is made especially for teens: light on dialogue and heavy on loud music and special effects.

Titled “.08,” it stars students from Century High School in Santa Ana. One, Jesse Ibarra, plays “Danny,” a teen who learns a harsh lesson. The video begins with an ironic reference to old-style drunk-driving education. It’s the last day of school before spring break, and students at Century are at an assembly that discusses the perils of drunk driving -- but seem much more interested in applying lipstick and checking out car magazines than listening to an officer’s earnest discourse.

After school gets out, Danny bribes a liquor store customer to buy him a case of beer. That is all too common among high school students, said Lt. David R. Jones, a Santa Ana traffic division commander.

“These kids are willing to pay $40 for a six-pack of beer,” Jones said. “Some of them get pretty brazen.”

Underage teens who want to drink have thrived since budget cuts have decimated the number of officers out on patrol, and Internet alcohol sales have increased.

After getting the beer in the video, Danny takes the case to a house party. Accompanied by a loud rap soundtrack, he drinks, makes out with his girlfriend and then agrees to drive two much more drunk friends home.

But in a spectacular crash at Fairview Street and Warner Avenue, complete with a fireball mushrooming into the night sky, three people are killed and Danny’s life destroyed. The last scene shows him in a Santa Ana Jail wheelchair, being wheeled into a youth detention facility.

“Danny lost his legs, his girlfriend and his freedom,” reads a summary at the end. “He was sentenced to 29 years and 8 months in prison.”

His blood-alcohol level, the video adds, was just 0.03%.

The video is chilling, but on some students it still has little effect, McDermott said. Some are even able to handle the simulators with no trouble, driving “drunk” as easily as they maneuver through the streets in the regular game. But McDermott saves his most potent weapon for last.

“I call it my circle of life,” McDermott said. “If I don’t get them with the video, I get them with the simulators. If not with those, then I always get them with the goggles.”

Even the cockiest guy has to admit defeat when asked to hold out a leg while wearing the goggles and he ends up falling over. It’s nearly impossible to see straight or walk in a straight line while wearing the goggles, and that’s what officers hope hits students the hardest.

“Kids really do believe they can operate normally with a couple of beers in their system,” McDermott said. “We want them to leave this trailer knowing that they can’t.”