There were 100 fewer people arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs in Santa Clara County during this year’s holiday crackdown compared to 2010.
From 12:01 a.m. Dec. 16 to midnight Dec. 31, officers from various law enforcement agencies in the county arrested 375 people. In 2010, there were 475 DUI arrests during the same period.
Winter Holiday Anti-DUI Crackdown arrest data collection continued through midnight Monday.
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375 incompetent drivers on the road is still 375 too many.
Buy why were there fewer arrests this year? Fewer drunks or less aggressive police?
Fewer arrests? My guess would be that the majority of police forces in Santa Clara County, due to budget cuts, are operating with fewer officers than they have in the past. Certainly the case here in Palo Alto.
Checkpoints arrests for drunk driving have become fewer and fewer, over the years. The police have shifted to using them to generally impose a “police presence” on the highway … checking for drugs, improper registrations and weapons .. rather than intoxicated drivers.
The article did not mention checkpoint arrests, so presumably the police were not interested in pointing out that they might have not caught more than a couple people at this traffic choke points.
There also is no mention of accidents that were caused by allegedly drunk drivers. So, the impact of the arrests is not exactly clear.
And with the economy as bad as it is, there have been virtually no articles about the wild “shindigs” that we used to see here in the ’80s .. so, there was probably not much “corporate”-provided alcohol in one the streets this year either.
Another thing missing from this article is the expected number of alcohol-related arrests for a fifteen-day period during other months. 375 arrests comes to about 23 per 24-hour day. Without some knowledge of what that number is outside of the year-end holiday season, the 375 number is not all that meaningful.
Maybe this exercise isn’t all that meaningful at this time.