Drunk Driving Checkpoints are Not Effective

The American Beverage Institute is an industry-sponsored advocacy group that has stood up to Mother Against Drunk Drivers and their campaing for roadside checkpoints. The beverage group says that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) should back off from the roadblocks and instead support roving patrols to catch heavy drinkers. “By promoting sobriety checkpoints, MADD and NHTSA are ignoring the root cause of today’s drunk driving problem – hard core alcohol abusers,” ABI managing director Sarah Longwell said in a statement.

“Because they are highly visible by design and publicized in advance, roadblocks are all too easily avoided by the chronic alcohol abusers who comprise the core of today’s drunk driving problem,” Longwell said. “That leaves adults who enjoyed a beer while watching a game or a glass of wine with dinner to be harassed at checkpoints.”

Charles M. Rowland joins in calling for a moratorium on DUI checkpoints.  Roving patrols (called saturation patrols in Ohio) provide better results and do not threaten the cherished American value of requiring reasonable articulable suspicion prior to an officer’s initiation of a traffic stop and the requirement of probable cause upon which to base an arrest.