Posts Tagged ‘Orange County Register’

Irvine DUI Checkpoint Results in Two Arrests

Tuesday, May 10th, 2011

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The Irvine Police Department arrested two people on suspicion of driving under the influence and issued 10 citations during a DUI and driver’s license checkpoint Friday night at Campus Drive and Bridge Road, Lt. Henry Boggs said.

Officers stopped 545 vehicles and conducted nine sobriety tests as part of the project, which including state and federal funding and was staffed by sworn police officers, professional staff and community volunteers.

An Orange County Register article on the DUi checkpoint cited Mothers Against Drunk Driving, saying that they estimated that communities consistently using sobriety checkpoints experience as much as eight times the reduction in DUI incidents as communities that use roving patrols alone.  This statistic is cited in a 2005 webpage from MADD Orange County, with no supporting studies, statistics, or mention that Laguna Beach has severely cutting, almost eliminating, the ineffective checkpoints.

Posts Tagged ‘Orange County Register’

Irvine DUI Checkpoint Results in Two Arrests

Tuesday, May 10th, 2011

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Baja Sharkeez on Main Street might have to shut down its entertainment at 11 p.m. starting in March.

Police Chief Kenneth Small sent a letter to owner Greg Newman saying that because of various alcohol violations and arrests at the downtown bar late at night, police are looking to restrict the establishment’s entertainment permit.

Small said Sharkeez saw 72 drunken driving arrests in 22 months.

Newman said he thought there was some misinformation in collecting the data because his Newport Beach location did not have any violations. Newman also said he has never been fined by the state department of Alcoholic Beverage Control.

However, as a result Hermosa Beach’s Baja Sharkeez is launching the South Bay Safe Streets program to combat the number of patrons who leave the bar and are arrested for driving under the influence.

Greg Newman, co-owner of the popular restaurant, found out this week that his Hermosa Beach location leads neighboring downtown bars in the number of customers who have been arrested for a DUI after leaving restaurants. Sharkeez has 51 arrests in the last two years; 31 of them were in 2010.

This news comes on the heels of a recent investigation into the number of DUI-related arrests connected to his Huntington Beach location. According to the Orange County Register, there have been 72 DUI arrests in the last two years associated with the Sharkeez in Huntington Beach.

Most of Hermosa Beach’s restaurants and bars averaged between two and five DUI arrests that were connected to their establishments through 2009 and 2010. Coming in second was Patrick Malloy’s with 13 DUI-related arrests in two years, eight of which came from 2010. Third was Caf/ Boogaloo at 12, with eight from 2010.

Police Chief Greg Savelli said the numbers are collected at the time of an arrest when an officer asks the person where they are came from. Savelli said he has no intention of investigating the Hermosa Beach Sharkeez location and believes the bar’s high number of DUI arrests is due to the restaurant’s popularity.

“That’s the most popular location. It doesn’t really mean very much,” Savelli said. “I just think he runs a popular place.”

Savelli also said it’s difficult to place blame on a restaurant or bar for having connections to a DUI because a patron while driving can show signs that they might be under the influence well before they display characteristics of being intoxicated while at a bar. He said two drinks can get someone a DUI, but they could easily have more than five drinks before becoming noticeably intoxicated and a bartender would cut them off.

Regardless, Sharkeez’s owners are going to do something about it.

“It’s definitely a negative that we have this many,” Newman said. “We need to do something.”

On Monday, Feb. 21, Newman is launching a South Bay Safe Streets Program via Sharkeez.

Newman said the program aims to reduce drinking and driving in Hermosa Beach. To do that, Sharkeez will only serve single-sized drinks from midnight to close to deter excessive drinking and allow staff to monitor customer consumption more effectively. New customers will not be allowed to enter Sharkeez after 1:15 a.m. Newman said that will discourage people trying to land an extra last drink. Sharkeez will also be closing at 1:30 a.m. instead of 2 a.m. to help clear the streets earlier and allow more taxicabs to be available for its patrons.

He said staff will also frequently remind customers not to drink and drive with audio announcements, signs at the entrance and on all tables, posters and special buttons worn by staff.
Newman said Sharkeez is also teaming up with United Taxi and Yellow Cab to offer taxi vouchers for $5 off rides. Sharkeez staff will pass the vouchers out throughout the night and to customers leaving the restaurant.

Also, every two years staff members will have to take a day class to get a Mandatory Serve Safe certification to remind them of all the city and state regulations and to help deter overserving.

“We want to lead the charge in creating safer streets and a safer downtown area by reducing drinking and driving in our community,” according to Newman.

Newman said they plan to ask Savelli for the new DUI statistics in 90 days after the program has been established to see if it is working.

“We’ll find out in 90 days if it’s making a difference, if we’re in the right direction,” Newman said. “If not, we’ll add more stuff.”

Savelli said the program is a good first step.

Newman said if it works, he looks forward to other restaurants and bars implementing similar programs.

Mayor Pro Tem Howard Fishman said the statistics of DUIs in Hermosa Beach “show that people aren’t drinking responsibly” and that it’s not one restaurant’s fault.

“I’m not going to point a finger at Sharkeez,” Fishman said.

Councilman Michael DiVirgilio said he was “surprised” to see the DUI figures related to Sharkeez and that it was “disturbing.” He’s going to encourage the police, city staff and restaurant owners to work together to come up with ways to lower the number of intoxicated drivers.

“We need to have our staff lead the effort,” DiVirgilio said.

“I think in general any number is too high. We should be finding a way to drive the numbers down.”

DiVirgilio also recommended having more DUI checkpoints throughout the year and more electronic message boards on city streets discouraging drunk driving.

Newman said he welcomes any meetings between restaurant owners and the city to fight the DUI arrests.

“It’s definitely a good idea to have a meeting on this,” Newman said. “If this (program) works well, I think the city will want other restaurants doing it.”

Newman also said he’ll suggest that the Hermosa Beach Restaurant Association discuss how to fight drinking and driving at its next meeting.

“We’re about being proactive and not justifying,” Newman said. “It’s all about reducing the number of DUIs.”

Because a whopping 72 of its patrons were arrested for drunk-driving in a 22-month period, Baja Sharkeez in Huntington Beach will soon have to stop its entertainment at 11 p.m. nightly.

Meaning no deejay-ing or live performances after that. Though alcohol can still be served until 1:30 a.m., when the restaurant closes.

[Insert sound of head-scratching here.]

Huntington Beach Police Chief Ken Small sent a letter to Sharkeez owner Greg Newman saying the new hours will go into effect March 1, when the restaurant renews its entertainment permit.

This curfew of sorts comes after the California Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control opened an investigation on the restaurant last month.

Newman, who previously said Sharkeez was being unfairly targeted due to its popularity,  seems to be cooperating with police, though he’s asking Small if the restaurant can get a 90-day trial with the new entertainment hours. According to the Huntington Beach Independent, Newman has met with Small to share some ideas on how to help curb alcohol consumption and the problems because of it. The restaurant will stop serving large cups or pitchers of alcohol at midnight, and is in the process of partnering with a cab company to offer vouchers for tipsy customers. He’s also researching whether the restaurant can use a breathalyzer to measure customers’ blood alcohol level before they get their last drink at 1:15 a.m., the Independent reports.

Huntington Beach takes the No. 1 spot in 2009 California DUI collisions among cities of its size. The city has been scrambling to find ways to address the issue, recently voting downthe idea of posting mugshots of repeat DUI offenders on its Facebook page.

Posts Tagged ‘Orange County Register’

Irvine DUI Checkpoint Results in Two Arrests

Tuesday, May 10th, 2011

I received a tip from someone at the Orange County Register that the Santa Ana Police Department will be conducting a DUI checkpoint tonight, Friday, in the 1600 Block of North Tustin Avenue, in Santa Ana near Orange (near where the Fling and other dive bars are located.

If you have questions for Orange County DUI Lawyers, contact our firm anytime.

Posts Tagged ‘Orange County Register’

Irvine DUI Checkpoint Results in Two Arrests

Tuesday, May 10th, 2011

Barbara Venezia, a columnist at the Orange County Register, had a great article on Orange County DUI cases, especially checkpoints.  I’m reproducing it below, since I think it’s helpful.

Venezia: Non-drinkers also should pay attention to DUI checkpoints

The California Office of Traffic Safety is calling 2010 the “Year of the DUI Checkpoint.” They’re funding $8 million in grants to 148 law enforcement agencies for 2,500 checkpoints.

Each time I see a sobriety checkpoint notice in the O.C. Register, I think, isn’t it better to surprise drunk drivers instead of warning them to take other routes? Don’t drunks read the newspaper? Or is the P.D. counting on the fact these liquored up knuckleheads most likely won’t remember what they’ve read the next day anyway?

And for those who are either too drunk or too dumb to heed the newspaper warnings, there’s www.sobrietyalerts.com sending text messages to subscribers for $19.95 a year with a heads-up on checkpoints in designated areas. The site states, “official police use only.” But no where on the sign-up form does it ask if you’re a cop. They do claim “Our goal is to prevent primitive behavior and deter any impaired drivers from operating a vehicle.” My guess, their only goal is making money.

Seems they’re not the only ones with a unique use of DUI alerts. Diamond Productions is an event planning and promotions company. Their site, www.bestocevents.com, sends out about 21,000 emails to “mostly single people ages 21-50 in the Newport/Irvine/OC area,” promoting parties. But the site also includes a rather extensive O.C. DUI checkpoint page. Is this a public service, or are they gingerly alerting partygoers to route differently? Needless to say, it probably boosts site hits and it’s free.

As someone who hasn’t had a drink in 22 years, I’ve never paid much attention to sobriety checkpoint alerts thinking it didn’t really affect me; that was until I witnessed the horrendous traffic jam on Harbor Boulevard at 5 p.m. during rush hour traffic on Monday, March 1. Then it occurred to me: I should’ve paid more attention. You don’t have to be drunk to be a knucklehead stuck in traffic you could have avoided!

But the fact remained; I wondered why Costa Mesa and Newport P.D.’s release DUI checkpoint plans to the press. So I called Costa Mesa Police Chief Shawkey, I wasn’t surprised; it’s all about civil rights.

“The Supreme Court identified factors for minimizing the intrusiveness on the individual while balancing the needs of society in keeping drunk drivers off the road” he said. “That’s why we have to give motorists early warning so a driver can exit the checkpoint if they wish to, a press release announcing where checkpoints will be, and a mathematical formula to decide which drivers are stopped that can only be changed by a supervisor.”

The day after the March 1 checkpoint, I was curious about the results. Apparently 2,055 cars passed through, 633 were checked, and three people were arrested on suspicion of DUI. And then I read about the drunken guy who walked up to the checkpoint to get a closer look. He obviously didn’t get the text. Maybe cash-strapped C.M. should charge for spectator viewing?

Interestingly enough, in 2009 C.M. P.D. arrested 494 people for being drunk in public. But Mark David Allen, arrested over 470 times for public drunkenness, has to hold the local record. Disturbingly, furiouslove.com, a website started by Newport jailer David J. Sperling, tracks him almost daily.

Our Newport Beach DUI Lawyers are available if you have any questions, 24 hours a day.  Call (877) 568-2977 anytime.

Related articles

• DUI Checkpoint in the Universal City Area Tonight (laist.com)
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• Seal Beach: Results of DUI Checkpoint (cehwiedel.com)
• Random roadside breath testing may soon be on the way (canada.com)
• Police: Twitter used to avoid DUI checkpoints (seattletimes.nwsource.com)
• CA Sobriety Checkpoints Are Becoming More About Profit Than Drunk Driving (dvorak.org)

Posts Tagged ‘Orange County Register’

Irvine DUI Checkpoint Results in Two Arrests

Tuesday, May 10th, 2011

California Watch, one of the few remaining bastions of investigative reporting, had a description about their week’s workflow, and what happens when there’s a busy story, like their s DUI checkpoint story about profits for police.

The important story last week regarding Los Angeles DUI checkpoints, Orange County DUI checkpoints, and Long Beach DUI Checkpoints, was an important one.  The following is their day-by-day breakdown of how their collaboration with the Investigative Reporting Program at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism, KQED Radio and other news outlets came together last week:

Monday: We started contacting news partners about the checkpoint story, first giving them a several paragraph “budget line.” It pretty closely mirrored the top of the story as written:

California police departments are increasingly turning sobriety checkpoints into profitable operations that are far more likely to seize cars from unlicensed minority motorists than catch drunken drivers on the state’s roadways.

Many of the drivers losing their cars at checkpoints are illegal immigrants, an examination by the University of California, Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Program in collaboration with California Watch has found.

These unlicensed motorists rarely challenge the impounds, or have the cash to recover their cars.

Impounds at checkpoints in 2009 generated tens of millions of dollars in towing fees and police fines. Additionally, police officers collected checks for about more than $25 million in overtime pay for the DUI crackdowns, funded by the California Office of Traffic Safety.

In the course of its examination, The Investigative Reporting Program reviewed hundreds of pages of city financial records and police reports, and analyzed data documenting the results from checkpoints the past two years. Other findings include:

• Sobriety checkpoints frequently screen traffic within, or near, Hispanic neighborhoods.

• The seizures appear to defy a 2005 federal appellate court ruling that determined police cannot impound cars solely because the driver is unlicensed.

• Departments frequently overstaff checkpoints with officers, all earning overtime pay.

Every day in newsrooms across the country, editors and reporters try to capture the interest of their bosses with tantalizing budget lines. Our situation is unique. We pitch our work to multiple outlets at the same time. Will they want our story? And if so, how will they play it?

Robert Rosenthal, the executive director of the Center for Investigative Reporting, and Louis Freedberg, the California Watch director who oversees our distribution efforts, began drumming up interest. They sent the budget line to numerous news organizations and followed up with e-mails and phone calls.

In the meantime, our copy editor William Cooley was looking over the story. Copy editors are a rare breed. The best ones are pains in the behind. And they consider it the highest possible compliment to be labeled as such. That’s what I love about Cooley. He is a talented intern from San Jose State. But he carries himself like a veteran.

He has not shied away from asking major prize-winning veteran reporters and editors to explain their methods or their premise. He asks uncomfortable but important questions. And he’s made some outstanding catches that have saved us from potentially embarrassing moments.

Tuesday: The reporter on the project, Ryan Gabrielson, sat down to go over Cooley’s comments and final questions from Rosenthal and me. Gabrielson is a fellow at the UC Berkeley Investigative Reporting Program. He won both the Pulitzer Prize and George Polk Award in 2009.

Last summer, he was offered a fellowship at UC Berkeley under the direction of the legendary Lowell Bergman. Soon after arriving in California, he began working on the checkpoint story. Bergman and Gabrielson started talking to us about it late last year and a first draft was submitted in January. I started editing it during our “Open Newsroom” on January 21.

We went back and forth on several drafts and were feeling really good about it. But there was work to do. Cooley had thought we needed more attribution and additional context. Gabrielson and I agreed. I also asked to have his methodology reviewed, so Gabrielson sent it to Steve Doig, a Pulitzer-winning journalism professor at Arizona State University and former board member at Investigative Reporters and Editors.

In the meantime, Data analyst Agustin Armendariz and multimedia producer Lisa Pickoff-White polished a snazzy interactive map of all the cities that got federal funding for checkpoints in 2008 and 2009. They built the map with data Gabrielson had gathered during his reporting.

Wednesday: Time to cut the story. The full-length version of Gabrielson’s draft was about 4,500 words – well over 150 inches. No daily newspaper in California would likely print a story of that length. We trimmed it to about 3,800 words – an appropriate length for the California Watch Web site.

Once that was done, the hard work began. I cut the story again – this time by more than half – to about 1,800 words. At that length it could fit in the news pages of our newspaper partners.

I showed it to Gabrielson, and he didn’t have a heart attack. A good sign. Rosenthal and Freedberg continued to work the phones to find media partners and to keep editors informed about our progress.

Based on our budget line, the Sacramento Bee seemed interested. So did the Orange County Register. The Bakersfield Californian and Stockton Record soon came on board. In addition to showing our methodology to an expert in computer-assisted reporting and statistical analysis, such as Doig, Rosenthal thought we needed to write about our methodology so that readers could understand how the reporting process evolved. Gabrielson banged that out.

He also wrote the text for two data pieces that Armendariz helped put together – one focusing on overtime costs and another looking at the UC Berkeley program that helps administer DUI checkpoint money.

Working with Gabrielson was a pleasure. It’s comforting to an editor when a reporter can quickly answer every question you toss their way. Gabrielson had great command of the subject, and he worked quickly and efficiently to turn around all of our requests. By midday, we were ready to distribute both versions of the story.

Even though we didn’t expect any newsroom to publish the full-length story, we made it available in case editors saw things in the longer draft that they wanted in the condensed version. Once the drafts are dispatched to news outlets, we await questions from editors. Because we’re almost always dealing with multiple partners, we end up fielding lots of inquiries from copy editors, project editors and managing editors as the week progresses.

When we launched California Watch last fall, I worried that it might be a little overwhelming to have so many layers of editors. We all know what it’s like to have too many cooks trying to season the soup. So far, knock on wood, it has actually worked. And we saw a perfect example of that just a few hours later. Sacramento Bee Projects Editor Amy Pyle suggested tweaking the first paragraph of our story. It made the top better and tighter. We made a couple of other adjustments and added a new fourth paragraph.

This was the new start (You can see how it differs slightly from the budget line):
Sobriety checkpoints in California are increasingly turning into profitable operations for local police departments that are far more likely to seize cars from unlicensed motorists than catch drunken drivers.

And this was the added fourth paragraph:
In dozens of interviews over the past three months, law enforcement officials and tow truck operators say that vehicles are predominantly taken from minority motorists – often illegal immigrants.

Doig, the Arizona State professor, got back to us and said he was comfortable with our methods. In the meantime, Gabrielson was going through an entirely different editing process with the New York Times. Bergman, who had won a Pulitzer Prize working with the Times, had gotten the newspaper’s new Bay Area edition and PBS NewsHour interested months ago.

Gabrielson tailored a tightly focused draft for the Times that contained mostly information about Bay Area checkpoints. And he was going back and forth with editors there about changes to the story. He also prepped for a KQED Radio interview with Michael Montgomery and reviewed final video.

Thursday: La Opinion had begun to translate the story into Spanish. Web production assistant Sarah McHie made sure all our articles and pieces were coming together for our Web site. Pickoff-White produced a cool graphic showing the cities with the highest impound rates. She did this even though she had been laid up in a hospital for two days over the weekend. Now she had been ordered by her doctors to rest at home because she had what appeared to be swine flu. But a little H1N1 wasn’t going to stop her.

Gabrielson, meanwhile, headed over to KQED Radio in the morning to tape his radio interview. Later, he watched the NewsHour piece one last time before it got shipped to New York. He also went over the story line-by-line with the New York Times to make more changes to their draft.

Friday: We prepared a Word document with final fixes – just two revised paragraphs that added context in response to a question from Orange County Register Investigative Editor Chris Knap and another from the Sacramento Bee. Through this editing process, the story kept getting stronger.

Some news organizations were still weighing whether to run it. The Modesto Bee told us they would publish the story the following week. The Fresno Bee said they also would like to run it later. Freedberg got back the translated version from La Opinion.

One more time, we all looked over the final pieces that McHie had loaded into our content management system. We rewrote one headline on a graphic, but otherwise everything looked ready. Just as we were leaving the office, we received word that three more Southern California newspapers were interested.

Saturday: Logging in from home, Pickoff-White made sure everything went live at the right time. We posted the stories, charts, graphics and interactive map around 6 p.m.

Our California Watch News Alert went out shortly after, and we started sending out our “tweets” announcing the story. We also posted a link on Facebook. As a small startup, these social media tools are especially important to help spread the word about our work.

The New York Times posted their version early Saturday evening. In the meantime, around the state, several newspaper staffs were getting ready to put the story on their front pages for Sunday. KQED Radio would broadcast an interview with Gabrielson on Monday and the PBS NewsHour would devote a segment to the story Monday night.

Sunday: Finally, an opportunity to exhale – but not all of us. Sarah Terry-Cobo, a freelance journalist who also helps with distribution, scoured the Web for newspaper front pages for our own archives. We also kept pushing the story on Twitter and Facebook. Huffington Post picked up the story, driving thousands of new readers to our site. By the time the day was over, we had shattered our record for the most traffic on californiawatch.org in a single day.

Related articles:

• CA Sobriety Checkpoints Are Becoming More About Profit Than Drunk Driving (dvorak.org)
• CA Sobriety Checkpoints Snare Illegals, Pad Tow Companies? (thecarconnection.com)
• Study Examines Statewide DUI Checkpoints, Including LAPD’s (laist.com)
• Car Seizures At DUI Checkpoints Raise Money, Legal Questions (huffingtonpost.com)

Posts Tagged ‘Orange County Register’

Irvine DUI Checkpoint Results in Two Arrests

Tuesday, May 10th, 2011

The Orange County Register had a story about the upcoming DUI Checkpoint in Newport Beach this weekend.  Our Orange County DUI Lawyers bring it to you for your weekend planning.

NEWPORT BEACH – Police will stage a sobriety checkpoint from 9 p.m. Friday to 3 a.m. Saturday on northbound Dover Drive at 16th Street, a location bordered by several nightlife hotspots.

Cars passing the checkpoint will be chosen to move through screening lanes on a pre-determined basis designed to ensure the process is objective and random.

Arrests rarely climb into the double digits at checkpoints, which serve more as deterrents. Last month, a checkpoint staged at the entrance to the Balboa Peninsula resulted in six drunken-driving arrests, plus two more detentions for non-DUI-related offenses.

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• National Depression Screening Day – Orange County (ducknetweb.blogspot.com)

Posts Tagged ‘Orange County Register’

Irvine DUI Checkpoint Results in Two Arrests

Tuesday, May 10th, 2011

Police agencies all over Orange County are inviting the media to come along for their DUI checkpoints, which, as someone among the few Orange County DUI Lawyers on the front lines of  DUI defense in this county, I have repeatedly reminded people don’t work.

However, I was surprised to see an Orange County Register article mentioning in their photo caption that “DUI checkpoints in Orange County rarely result in many arrests, instead being used as deterrents.”

Funny that they would say that DUI checkpoints are deterrents, since most of the DUI checkpoint locations are not announced, a potential violation of the State of California Supreme Court’s Ingersoll case.  If they were not trying to catch people, but merely deter them, shouldn’t they be getting the word out early, vocally, and often, to “deter”, instead of arrest?

The article is below, and I am assuming that it’s based upon the Costa Mesa Police Department after report, which was first published at the Costa Mesa PD website, here.

“COSTA MESA – Motorists on Tuesday night for the most part didn’t let the holiday season ruin their good judgment, as a DUI checkpoint netted just one suspected drunk driver out of nearly 300 cars.

Costa Mesa police from 6 p.m. to midnight staged the sobriety-screening operation on Santa Ana Avenue at 18th Street. During that time, 296 vehicles drove through, 142 were stopped for further screening and 11 motorists were screened for drunken driving, but in the end, there was one DUI arrest. …”

Allegedly related articles:

• Adults behaving allegedly badly (timesunion.com)
• Tawny Kitaen Arrested!! (ithinkheblogs.com)
• Free Tipsy Tows for the Overly Inebriated Tomorrow Night (laist.com)

Posts Tagged ‘Orange County Register’

Irvine DUI Checkpoint Results in Two Arrests

Tuesday, May 10th, 2011

The Orange County Register today had a story about Deputy Dallas Hennessey, who has been named as Lake Forest Deputy of the Year.  Hennessey, a 10-year Orange County Sheriff’s Department veteran, in 2008 was honored by Mothers Against Drunk Driving for having the highest number of arrests among sheriff contract cities in the county. Since coming to Lake Forest in 2007, Hennessey has consistently been honored for his record arrests three years in a row. In 2008, more than 2,500 drivers were arrested for drunken driving countywide.

Hennessey — a drug recognition expert — has catching drunken drivers down to an art. In 2007, he arrested 111, becoming the department’s only deputy who has generated more than 100 arrests in one year.

Police services in Lake Forest have taken advantage of the deputy’s keen eye to continue an effort to take drunken drivers off the streets. In 2007, Lake Forest led cities that contract with the Sheriff’s Department in the number in DUI arrests, with 266. Stanton followed as a distant second with 188, and Dana Point reported 182.

Among Hennessey’s other accomplishments is his work as part of a special enforcement team. In this role, Hennessey, is part of an anti-tagging program. In 1½ years he and his partners have cleared out more than 100 cases and made more than 40 arrests. He is also active in community education and is a master instructor in the use of Taser and has testified as an expert in court.

“He is very involved and dedicated to the community,” said Lt. Doug Doyle, chief of police services for the city. “He produced an incredible body of work this year and he consistently far exceeds expectations in every area of his responsibilities.”

Watch out for Lake Forest – and if you have any questions for an Los Angeles DUI or Orange County DUI Lawyer, call me anytime at (877) 568-2977. I’m happy to help in any way that I can.

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Posts Tagged ‘Orange County Register’

Irvine DUI Checkpoint Results in Two Arrests

Tuesday, May 10th, 2011

The following article is from the Orange County Register. However, it has an incomplete listing of DUI checkpoints this weekend. See the master list of DUI checkpoints for this weekend for more than are listed here by our Orange County DUI lawyers:

Law enforcement agencies are wrapping up the summer with DUI checkpoints and are stepping up enforcement on seat belts and speeding.
Starting at 6 p.m. Friday and lasting through midnight Monday, all available California Highway Patrol officers will take to the roads in one of the department’s periodic maximum enforcement efforts, watching out for violators in the three leading causes of highway deaths: driving under the influence, not wearing seat belts, and speeding, the CHP said.
In 2008, more than 11,700 people died in highway crashes nationwide involving a driver with a blood alcohol concentration of .08 or higher. In California, the preliminary number for 2008 was 1,029 deaths, a 9 percent reduction from the year before.
During the Labor Day weekend enforcement period last year in Orange County, one person, a 64 year-old man, died after being ejected from his vehicle on the Beach Boulevard on-ramp to the northbound I-405, said CHP officer Jennifer Hink. The man was not wearing a seat-belt, she said.
The CHP arrested 67 people on suspicion of DUI during the same period, according to statistics.
Orange County agencies will also be conducting saturation patrols, in which all available officers are put on the roads to look for drunken drivers and other dangerous driving acts.
Here is a schedule of planned DUI enforcement operations:
•Checkpoint – Friday, Sept. 4, 7 p.m.–3 a.m., Dana Point
•Checkpoint – 9 p.m. Friday to 3 a.m. Saturday on northbound Newport Boulevard at Finley Avenue in Newport Beach
•Task force operation – Saturday, 8 p.m.–2 a.m., La Habra
•Saturation patrols – Saturday, 8 p.m. – 3 a.m., County of Orange
•Saturation patrols – Sunday, 8 p.m. – 3 a.m., County of Orange

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Posts Tagged ‘Orange County Register’

Irvine DUI Checkpoint Results in Two Arrests

Tuesday, May 10th, 2011

The following appeared in the Orange County Register this past Monday:

LAGUNA BEACH

A DUI checkpoint in South Laguna on Friday night nabbed six drivers and screened almost 2,000 motorists in five hours.

Laguna Beach police ran the checkpoint from 9 p.m. to 2:15 a.m. in the southbound lanes of South Pacific Coast Highway near Three Arch Bay.

In all 1,996 cars passed through. Laguna Beach police were assisted by officials from the state Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control, who passed out information about the dangers of drinking and driving.

Fifteen motorists were given field sobriety tests. Police found four unlicensed drivers.

In Irvine, a sobriety checkpoint at Barranca Parkway and Von Karman Street also on Friday night led to the arrest of two drivers.

In all, 185 drivers passed through the checkpoint. Police gave four sobriety tests. Two drivers failed. They also gave out five citations.

Statewide, DUI deaths fell 9 percent to 1,029 in 2008.

“Credit for the drop in DUI deaths goes to law enforcement, state and local agencies, Mothers Against Drunk Driving and other safety advocates,” said Christopher Murphy, director of the California Office of Traffic Safety. “In addition, the people of California have come together to address this deadly problem and are now seeing results. As positive as these figures are, though, we can never let up until we achieve our goal of zero deaths.”

As always, DUI checkpoints are politicized. The police agencies know they are ineffective (roving patrols are much much more effective at getting persons suspected of DUI arrested), but with the political pressure of MADD, and the matching funds of the federal government, they persist.

Anyway, if you have questions for our Orange County DUI lawyers, be sure to call, anytime, at (714) 568-1560.

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