See Update No. 2 on page 2 with the final stats from the July 4 holiday weekend anti-DUI enforcement. Update No. 1 on the next page is about added checkpoints and saturation patrols.
ORIGINAL POST, JULY 3, 6:02 A.M.: The Irvine and Buena Park police departments hold DUI/drivers license checkpoints tonight. Where? Read on …
]
Buena Park is up first from 7 tonight through 2 a.m. Friday in the area of Beach Boulevard and Stanton Avenue, according to the city's police department.
Irvine starts an hour later but ends at the same time in the area of MacArthur Boulevard and Campus Drive, that department announced.
Funding for the ops in both cities comes from California Office of Traffic Safety grants, through the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
UPDATE NO. 1, JULY 3, 8:36 A.M.: Besides the Irvine and Buena Park checkpoints tonight, there will be others some time over the holiday weekend in Orange and Laguna Niguel, according to the Orange County Sheriff's Department-organized “Avoid the 38” DUI Task Force.
No other details about when and where those checkpoints will be have been released; we'll update again if we get the word.
“Avoid the 38,” named after the number of Orange County law enforcement agencies that belong to the task force, says its members “will be out in full force, aggressively targeting those who put lives in danger” over the holiday weekend.
“Every Orange County law enforcement agency is ramping up their enforcement to make our roads safer this Fourth of July,” says Sergeant Ray Wert of the Sheriff's Department Traffic Bureau, in the announcement. “For everyone's sake, don't drink and drive or you will be targeted for arrest-no excuses.”
“DUI saturation patrols,” where special units target specific areas with histories of drunken driving, will be running in Anaheim, Brea, Irvine, Orange, Westminster, Cal State Fullerton and contract cities and unincorporated areas covered by the sheriff's department, the task force announced.
The California Highway Patrol “will also be deploying all available officers onto freeways and county roads as part of their Maximum Enforcement Period,” the task force notes.
[
UPDATE NO. 2, JULY 9, 7:30 A.M.: From 12:01 a.m. Thursday through midnight Sunday, Orange County law enforcement arrested 214 people for driving under the influence of alcohol and/or drugs, according to the “Avoid the 38” task force.
There were no DUI-related deaths reported during the four-day campaign, ask the task force that takes its name from the 38 member agencies among Orange County law enforcement.
Over last year's Fourth of July holiday period, which lasted five days, there were 247 similar arrests and two DUI-related deaths.
The task force notes that this year's numbers are provisional as some agencies have yet to report.
Up next for “Avoid the 38” is an 18-day summer campaign that kicks off Aug. 17th and ends Labor Day weekend.
Email: mc****@oc******.com. Twitter: @MatthewTCoker. Follow OC Weekly on Twitter @ocweekly or on Facebook!
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.