The number of alcohol-related traffic fatalities has dropped in recent years in Colorado, and police and sheriff’s departments across the state will set up sobriety checkpoints this holiday weekend to further reduce drunken driving.
Still, some restaurant-industry officials say checkpoints, which routinely pull over drivers who have not been drinking or who have consumed very little alcohol, are not as effective as roving police patrols that target chronic drunken drivers.
“Hard-core drunk drivers” are adept at avoiding well-publicized sobriety checkpoints, said John Doyle, executive director of the American Beverage Institute, a Washington, D.C., trade group that represents the interests of the restaurant industry.
Studies show that roving police patrols aimed at removing drunken drivers from the road can produce three times the number of arrests that checkpoints do, Doyle said.
“Roadblocks and PR campaigns,” Doyle’s group said this week, “target responsible adults, while they ignore the root cause of today’s drunk-driving problem: hard-core product abusers and repeat offenders.”
Twelve states have banned the use of sobriety checkpoints, he said.
Others say checkpoints are effective in reducing accidents.
“Sobriety checkpoints consistently reduced alcohol-related crashes, typically by about 20 percent,” the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control said, referring to a recent review of nearly two dozen international studies. The agency is a unit of the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Col. Mark Trostel, chief of the Colorado State Patrol, said sobriety checkpoints and “saturation patrols” that focus on finding drunken drivers are equally effective tools.
The State Patrol uses “both approaches to attacking the problem,” Trostel said Wednesday as he joined Gov. Bill Owens in promoting drunken-driving enforcement for the Memorial Day weekend.
About 20 law-enforcement agencies across Colorado will use saturation patrols this weekend.
Owens said the state has seen a dramatic drop in alcohol-related traffic fatalities over the past 24 years, from a high of 425 in 1981 to 215 in 2003, and sobriety checkpoints have played a role in reducing the death rate.
“It works,” Owens said.
Beginning Friday, police agencies in Steamboat Springs and Adams, Douglas and Gilpin counties will set up checkpoints to catch drunken drivers. At least eight other agencies will follow up with their own checkpoints throughout the weekend.
Some business interests have objected to the slogan “You drink, you drive, you lose” that federal highway-safety officials have attached to previous sobriety-checkpoint campaigns and other efforts to combat drunken driving.
“It is not illegal to drink an alcohol beverage and drive,” said Peter Meersman, president of the Colorado Restaurant Association. “It is illegal to drink too many alcohol beverages and drive.”
Staff writer Jeffrey Leib can be reached at 303-820-1645 or jleib@denverpost.com.
