If you're driving south tonight—or north from South County—you may want to program your GPS to avoid the cities of Dana Point, San Clemente and San Juan Capistrano.
That's because the Orange County Sheriff's Department, which patrols all three, is holding “saturation patrols” from 8 tonight through 4 a.m. Saturday in each town.
Now, a saturation patrol does not involve sheriff's deputies pouring bottles of Devil's Cut over themselves before patrolling their sectors—although what they do in their spare time, so long as it does not hurt anyone else, is none of our business.
In this case, saturation patrols are extra special patrols where patrolmen patrol streets where boozy drivers have been cited, arrested, gotten into accidents, gotten themselves killed and/or killed others.
“Typically in December we see a rise in DUI collisions and arrests,” reads a statement from Deputy Wayne Howard of the sheriff's Traffic Bureau. “We will be out looking for impaired drivers. This is a zero tolerance crackdown so the public is reminded to drive sober or get pulled over.”
As with DUI checkpoints, these patrols are funded through grants provided by the California Office of Traffic Safety, through the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
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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.