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Some see Fresno's DUI crackdown as a model
By Larry Copeland, USA TODAY
FRESNO, Calif. — It's a Saturday night in Fresno, which means another "bar sting" at another nightclub. This one is at Crossroads, a red-and-white themed bar on North Cedar Street popular with bikers. As closing time nears, undercover police stake out the parking lot and look for departing customers who appear to be drunk.
One officer observes a man walking unsteadily as he leaves the bar. When he gets in his SUV and starts to drive off, other officers swoop down on him. The officers find a loaded Glock handgun in the center console. The man's friend, who owns the SUV, walks over to show the police his concealed weapons permit. But he's been drinking, too, and the permit is void if he's intoxicated.
They arrest him, too.
Fresno may be the toughest city in the nation on drunken drivers. An intoxicated motorist is more likely to run into a police checkpoint in this city of 461,000 than anywhere else in the USA, according to Fresno police. Police sneak into the driveways of convicted drunken drivers to plant Global Positioning System tracking devices on their cars and search their homes for evidence they've been drinking.
Fresno's hard-as-nails approach to drunken driving comes at a time when some police, prosecutors, probation officials and traffic safety advocates are calling for stepped-up efforts to reduce the death toll from drunken driving. After declining steadily for nearly 20 years, the number of people killed each year in alcohol-related crashes leveled off — at 16,000 to 17,000 — in the mid-1990s and hasn't dropped significantly since.
Most people who drive drunk don't get caught. Only about 1 in 50 alcohol-impaired drivers is actually arrested, says Susan Ferguson, senior vice president for research at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a non-profit research organization supported by auto insurance companies. "What it amounts to is an awful lot of people who are driving impaired in this country who have no fear of being arrested," Ferguson says.
Many of those who do get arrested don't stop driving drunk. About a third of all drivers arrested for drunken driving are repeat offenders, according to Mothers Against Drunk Driving. The group says 50% to 75% of drivers whose licenses are suspended or revoked for DUI continue to drive without a license.
Those numbers are unacceptable to some fed-up police, probation officers and prosecutors, who are using increasingly aggressive tactics to reduce drunken driving:
•In Nassau County, N.Y., on Long Island, District Attorney Kathleen Rice won a rare murder conviction last month in a drunken-driving case. Insurance salesman Martin Heidgen, 25, was convicted of second-degree murder in the July 2005 deaths of Katie Flynn, 7, and Stanley Rabinowitz, 59, who was driving the limousine that Heidgen struck head-on. Heidgen had been driving the wrong way on Meadowbrook Parkway. Katie and her family were being driven home from a wedding. Heidgen, who faces a maximum prison sentence of 25 years to life, will be sentenced later this month. His attorney says he will appeal.
"We would hope that this verdict sends a message that if you drink and drive and kill someone, you will be prosecuted for murder," Rice said after the conviction. She no longer allows plea deals in drunken-driving cases and plans to use a state grant to buy high-tech alcohol-detecting ankle bracelets for convicted drunken drivers who are required to stay sober as part of their probation.
•The Riverside County Probation Department in California this year began tracking up to 130 repeat offenders with a 2-½ ounce tracking device armed with GPS technology. The device, which can be worn as a bracelet or anklet, alerts authorities in less than one minute when a convicted DUI offender enters a bar, says Michael DeGasperin, director of the department. Many of the felony DUI offenders in the cities of Temecula, Murrieta and Perris already wear a similar device, a Secure Continuous Remote Alcohol Monitor (SCRAM) ankle bracelet that measures the alcohol in a person's system by collecting minute sweat samples.
"Both are good deterrents in trying to out-fox the fox," DeGasperin says. "We want it to be a little intrusive and Big Brother-ish to get them to raise the white flag and come to us to seek help before they're involved in another accident."
•More than 30 states have enacted additional penalties for so-called "high-risk" drunken drivers, those with a blood-alcohol content of .15% to .20%. The legal limit in all 50 states is .08%. Twenty-eight states assign prosecutors to focus on drunken driving. Five states — Maine, North Carolina, Utah, Virginia and Wisconsin — have lowered the maximum blood-alcohol content for repeat offenders to varying limits below .08%.
Changing the culture
No place has gone as far as Fresno. Its crackdown on drunken driving and other traffic violations began when Jerry Dyer, who has been on the police force since 1979, became chief in 2001 and realized that more people in his city were being killed in automobile collisions than in homicides.
"Back in 2002, we had 43 murders in our city but we had 52 people die in fatal collisions," he says. "We know the individuals killed in homicides are generally associated with a certain lifestyle or they're in domestic situations. But the individuals being killed in traffic collisions are people like you and me, minding their own business, when somebody drunk runs a red light and kills them.
"I vowed at that time to change the driving culture in Fresno."
He hired 92 new officers, boosted revenue from traffic fines by $5 million a year and cut drunken-driving deaths. Fresno also began warning those convicted of DUIs that, while they were on probation, GPS devices might be attached to their cars.
In September, MADD gave Fresno police its "Outstanding Law Enforcement Agency" award. "I wish other departments throughout the nation would take the initiative to do what Fresno is doing," says Glynn Birch, MADD's national president. "For the past 10 years, the numbers (of drunken-driving fatalities) have plateaued. We need to re-energize the nation."
Last year the International Association of Chiefs of Police recognized the department for having the best impaired-driving program in the nation. Fresno police officers attend law enforcement seminars where they tell other cops what they're doing here.
The Fresno experiment might be difficult for some police departments to duplicate at a time when cops around the country are being stretched thin by federally-mandated homeland security duties, increases in violent crime and, in some rural and small-town areas, the first-time appearance of gangs.
But research has shown that police departments that strictly enforce traffic laws make an impact on other crime, says John Grant, manager of the division of state and provincial police at the IACP.
"In some agencies, it's not viewed as fighting real crime," he says. "It's not the glamorous thing. But one thing that virtually all criminals have in common is use of an automobile, whether it's in the planning, the perpetrating or the escape from their crime. And very often, they don't pay attention to traffic laws."
A few miles from the bar sting operation, Fresno police are working yet another DUI checkpoint. This one, at Ventura and R Streets, is marked by a large sign telling drivers: "Check Point Ahead. DUI and License." A line of orange cones funnels drivers into two single lanes, where police officers check every third motorist's driver's license and look for signs of intoxication: slurred speech, bloodshot eyes, the smell of alcohol. Many drivers already have their windows down and licenses held up for inspection as they approach the brightly lit checkpoint.
"The word's out in this town," says Detective Mark Van Wyhe, who coordinates the police department's Repeat DUI Offender Program. "They know we're out here."
Dozens of checkpoints
They should. The city ran 94 DUI checkpoints last year, more than any other city in the nation. The checkpoints, at different times and places, are set up on weekends.
Fresno's bar stings generated controversy when police started them last spring. "There were lots of threats, but no legal action," says Capt. Andrew Hall, commander of the police department's Traffic Bureau.
Initially, plainclothes police staked out the inside of bars, watched customers consume too much alcohol, then alerted fellow officers outside, who arrested the drunks as they drove off. To defuse the controversy, the officers were moved to the parking lots of the targeted clubs, Dyer says.
Police also run "courtroom stings," monitoring courtrooms where drivers cited for traffic violations are appearing. In many instances, judges suspend the motorists' licenses. The police officers follow them to their cars and arrest them if they drive off. They also conduct "probation and parole sweeps," searching the homes of convicted drunken drivers for evidence they've been drinking. In some instances, police arrest probationers because other family members have beer cans or liquor bottles in the home.
"We're seeing a real change of attitude," Hall says. "People who are planning on going out drinking are now planning alternative rides home. That's one of the exciting things about what we're doing, is the number of designated drivers we're seeing."
Enforcement or snooping?
When Fresno police launched the bar stings in March, it touched off a public outcry in the press and on talk radio. Fresno Bee columnist Bill McEwen questioned the wisdom of allowing a person who is obviously drunk to drive even a short distance. He said the bar sting "smacks of Big Brother."
Dyer says he modified the sting operations primarily because of concerns about potential police liability. While the stings were temporarily halted, a 35-year-old mother was killed by a driver who'd allegedly gotten drunk at one of the bars where police had conducted a sting. "We reinstated the program the following day," he says. "As a result of the death, the bar operation was widely accepted. The vast majority of restaurant owners and bar owners are supportive" of the modified approach.
McEwen lauded the changes.
But Carrie Fagan-Davis, owner of Fagan's Irish Pub downtown, says she opposes the bar stings whether officers are inside the clubs or in the parking lot.
"It's not the American way to spy on people," says Fagan-Davis, 54. "The police should watch the streets for drunken drivers but don't watch the bars. It's the responsibility of the bar owners to monitor what they serve patrons. Anybody who's in a business of this type needs to be responsible. The last thing I would want is to have it on my conscience that an extra $4 drink caused somebody harm. I look at that as a blood dollar. I don't want it."
Fagan-Davis says her business is about 70% food and 30% alcohol. She says that for St. Patrick's Day this year she made sure patrons had arranged for designated drivers, encouraged them to use hotels and educated her employees on spotting someone who's had too much to drink. She says officials from the state Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control were impressed by her actions.
Bob Pierce, 49, has owned the Crossroads bar, where police set up a parking lot sting operation earlier this month, for six months. He says he is working to improve the bar's image. "We want to clean it up, bring in more older customers," he says.
Pierce says the stings "definitely hurt our business. I'd like to see a better way to do it. I'd like to see a business owners association figure out a better way."
Rogers Smith, a political science professor and civil liberties expert at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law, says the bar stings and surreptitious placing of GPS devices "are aggressive police tactics. They go right up against the boundary of what the police can permissibly do, but they don't cross it. There is nothing that constitutes a violation of a constitutional right or civil liberty."
On sneaking into a driveway to place a GPS tracking device, Smith says the issue is "whether an action to monitor you — whether it's wiretaps, filming, or whatever — invades a reasonable expectation of privacy. For most of us, to have a GPS device put on our car would violate a reasonable expectation of privacy. But you're talking about people who were given warning as a condition of their probation that they were susceptible to this."
The police here are cautious about claiming outright success, but they clearly believe that their aggressive tactics are working. There hasn't been an alcohol-related traffic death since May, says Hall of the Traffic Bureau. There were eight such deaths this year before the bar stings began, he says.
"We were on track to exceed the 2005 fatalities," Hall says. "That's when we decided we had to do more."
(emphasis added)
By Larry Copeland, USA TODAY
FRESNO, Calif. — It's a Saturday night in Fresno, which means another "bar sting" at another nightclub. This one is at Crossroads, a red-and-white themed bar on North Cedar Street popular with bikers. As closing time nears, undercover police stake out the parking lot and look for departing customers who appear to be drunk.
One officer observes a man walking unsteadily as he leaves the bar. When he gets in his SUV and starts to drive off, other officers swoop down on him. The officers find a loaded Glock handgun in the center console. The man's friend, who owns the SUV, walks over to show the police his concealed weapons permit. But he's been drinking, too, and the permit is void if he's intoxicated.
They arrest him, too.
Fresno may be the toughest city in the nation on drunken drivers. An intoxicated motorist is more likely to run into a police checkpoint in this city of 461,000 than anywhere else in the USA, according to Fresno police. Police sneak into the driveways of convicted drunken drivers to plant Global Positioning System tracking devices on their cars and search their homes for evidence they've been drinking.
Fresno's hard-as-nails approach to drunken driving comes at a time when some police, prosecutors, probation officials and traffic safety advocates are calling for stepped-up efforts to reduce the death toll from drunken driving. After declining steadily for nearly 20 years, the number of people killed each year in alcohol-related crashes leveled off — at 16,000 to 17,000 — in the mid-1990s and hasn't dropped significantly since.
Most people who drive drunk don't get caught. Only about 1 in 50 alcohol-impaired drivers is actually arrested, says Susan Ferguson, senior vice president for research at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a non-profit research organization supported by auto insurance companies. "What it amounts to is an awful lot of people who are driving impaired in this country who have no fear of being arrested," Ferguson says.
Many of those who do get arrested don't stop driving drunk. About a third of all drivers arrested for drunken driving are repeat offenders, according to Mothers Against Drunk Driving. The group says 50% to 75% of drivers whose licenses are suspended or revoked for DUI continue to drive without a license.
Those numbers are unacceptable to some fed-up police, probation officers and prosecutors, who are using increasingly aggressive tactics to reduce drunken driving:
•In Nassau County, N.Y., on Long Island, District Attorney Kathleen Rice won a rare murder conviction last month in a drunken-driving case. Insurance salesman Martin Heidgen, 25, was convicted of second-degree murder in the July 2005 deaths of Katie Flynn, 7, and Stanley Rabinowitz, 59, who was driving the limousine that Heidgen struck head-on. Heidgen had been driving the wrong way on Meadowbrook Parkway. Katie and her family were being driven home from a wedding. Heidgen, who faces a maximum prison sentence of 25 years to life, will be sentenced later this month. His attorney says he will appeal.
"We would hope that this verdict sends a message that if you drink and drive and kill someone, you will be prosecuted for murder," Rice said after the conviction. She no longer allows plea deals in drunken-driving cases and plans to use a state grant to buy high-tech alcohol-detecting ankle bracelets for convicted drunken drivers who are required to stay sober as part of their probation.
•The Riverside County Probation Department in California this year began tracking up to 130 repeat offenders with a 2-½ ounce tracking device armed with GPS technology. The device, which can be worn as a bracelet or anklet, alerts authorities in less than one minute when a convicted DUI offender enters a bar, says Michael DeGasperin, director of the department. Many of the felony DUI offenders in the cities of Temecula, Murrieta and Perris already wear a similar device, a Secure Continuous Remote Alcohol Monitor (SCRAM) ankle bracelet that measures the alcohol in a person's system by collecting minute sweat samples.
"Both are good deterrents in trying to out-fox the fox," DeGasperin says. "We want it to be a little intrusive and Big Brother-ish to get them to raise the white flag and come to us to seek help before they're involved in another accident."
•More than 30 states have enacted additional penalties for so-called "high-risk" drunken drivers, those with a blood-alcohol content of .15% to .20%. The legal limit in all 50 states is .08%. Twenty-eight states assign prosecutors to focus on drunken driving. Five states — Maine, North Carolina, Utah, Virginia and Wisconsin — have lowered the maximum blood-alcohol content for repeat offenders to varying limits below .08%.
Changing the culture
No place has gone as far as Fresno. Its crackdown on drunken driving and other traffic violations began when Jerry Dyer, who has been on the police force since 1979, became chief in 2001 and realized that more people in his city were being killed in automobile collisions than in homicides.
"Back in 2002, we had 43 murders in our city but we had 52 people die in fatal collisions," he says. "We know the individuals killed in homicides are generally associated with a certain lifestyle or they're in domestic situations. But the individuals being killed in traffic collisions are people like you and me, minding their own business, when somebody drunk runs a red light and kills them.
"I vowed at that time to change the driving culture in Fresno."
He hired 92 new officers, boosted revenue from traffic fines by $5 million a year and cut drunken-driving deaths. Fresno also began warning those convicted of DUIs that, while they were on probation, GPS devices might be attached to their cars.
In September, MADD gave Fresno police its "Outstanding Law Enforcement Agency" award. "I wish other departments throughout the nation would take the initiative to do what Fresno is doing," says Glynn Birch, MADD's national president. "For the past 10 years, the numbers (of drunken-driving fatalities) have plateaued. We need to re-energize the nation."
Last year the International Association of Chiefs of Police recognized the department for having the best impaired-driving program in the nation. Fresno police officers attend law enforcement seminars where they tell other cops what they're doing here.
The Fresno experiment might be difficult for some police departments to duplicate at a time when cops around the country are being stretched thin by federally-mandated homeland security duties, increases in violent crime and, in some rural and small-town areas, the first-time appearance of gangs.
But research has shown that police departments that strictly enforce traffic laws make an impact on other crime, says John Grant, manager of the division of state and provincial police at the IACP.
"In some agencies, it's not viewed as fighting real crime," he says. "It's not the glamorous thing. But one thing that virtually all criminals have in common is use of an automobile, whether it's in the planning, the perpetrating or the escape from their crime. And very often, they don't pay attention to traffic laws."
A few miles from the bar sting operation, Fresno police are working yet another DUI checkpoint. This one, at Ventura and R Streets, is marked by a large sign telling drivers: "Check Point Ahead. DUI and License." A line of orange cones funnels drivers into two single lanes, where police officers check every third motorist's driver's license and look for signs of intoxication: slurred speech, bloodshot eyes, the smell of alcohol. Many drivers already have their windows down and licenses held up for inspection as they approach the brightly lit checkpoint.
"The word's out in this town," says Detective Mark Van Wyhe, who coordinates the police department's Repeat DUI Offender Program. "They know we're out here."
Dozens of checkpoints
They should. The city ran 94 DUI checkpoints last year, more than any other city in the nation. The checkpoints, at different times and places, are set up on weekends.
Fresno's bar stings generated controversy when police started them last spring. "There were lots of threats, but no legal action," says Capt. Andrew Hall, commander of the police department's Traffic Bureau.
Initially, plainclothes police staked out the inside of bars, watched customers consume too much alcohol, then alerted fellow officers outside, who arrested the drunks as they drove off. To defuse the controversy, the officers were moved to the parking lots of the targeted clubs, Dyer says.
Police also run "courtroom stings," monitoring courtrooms where drivers cited for traffic violations are appearing. In many instances, judges suspend the motorists' licenses. The police officers follow them to their cars and arrest them if they drive off. They also conduct "probation and parole sweeps," searching the homes of convicted drunken drivers for evidence they've been drinking. In some instances, police arrest probationers because other family members have beer cans or liquor bottles in the home.
"We're seeing a real change of attitude," Hall says. "People who are planning on going out drinking are now planning alternative rides home. That's one of the exciting things about what we're doing, is the number of designated drivers we're seeing."
Enforcement or snooping?
When Fresno police launched the bar stings in March, it touched off a public outcry in the press and on talk radio. Fresno Bee columnist Bill McEwen questioned the wisdom of allowing a person who is obviously drunk to drive even a short distance. He said the bar sting "smacks of Big Brother."
Dyer says he modified the sting operations primarily because of concerns about potential police liability. While the stings were temporarily halted, a 35-year-old mother was killed by a driver who'd allegedly gotten drunk at one of the bars where police had conducted a sting. "We reinstated the program the following day," he says. "As a result of the death, the bar operation was widely accepted. The vast majority of restaurant owners and bar owners are supportive" of the modified approach.
McEwen lauded the changes.
But Carrie Fagan-Davis, owner of Fagan's Irish Pub downtown, says she opposes the bar stings whether officers are inside the clubs or in the parking lot.
"It's not the American way to spy on people," says Fagan-Davis, 54. "The police should watch the streets for drunken drivers but don't watch the bars. It's the responsibility of the bar owners to monitor what they serve patrons. Anybody who's in a business of this type needs to be responsible. The last thing I would want is to have it on my conscience that an extra $4 drink caused somebody harm. I look at that as a blood dollar. I don't want it."
Fagan-Davis says her business is about 70% food and 30% alcohol. She says that for St. Patrick's Day this year she made sure patrons had arranged for designated drivers, encouraged them to use hotels and educated her employees on spotting someone who's had too much to drink. She says officials from the state Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control were impressed by her actions.
Bob Pierce, 49, has owned the Crossroads bar, where police set up a parking lot sting operation earlier this month, for six months. He says he is working to improve the bar's image. "We want to clean it up, bring in more older customers," he says.
Pierce says the stings "definitely hurt our business. I'd like to see a better way to do it. I'd like to see a business owners association figure out a better way."
Rogers Smith, a political science professor and civil liberties expert at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law, says the bar stings and surreptitious placing of GPS devices "are aggressive police tactics. They go right up against the boundary of what the police can permissibly do, but they don't cross it. There is nothing that constitutes a violation of a constitutional right or civil liberty."
On sneaking into a driveway to place a GPS tracking device, Smith says the issue is "whether an action to monitor you — whether it's wiretaps, filming, or whatever — invades a reasonable expectation of privacy. For most of us, to have a GPS device put on our car would violate a reasonable expectation of privacy. But you're talking about people who were given warning as a condition of their probation that they were susceptible to this."
The police here are cautious about claiming outright success, but they clearly believe that their aggressive tactics are working. There hasn't been an alcohol-related traffic death since May, says Hall of the Traffic Bureau. There were eight such deaths this year before the bar stings began, he says.
"We were on track to exceed the 2005 fatalities," Hall says. "That's when we decided we had to do more."
(emphasis added)
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:banghead: 
