The Santa Ana Police Department holds a sobriety checkpoint tonight, while their counterparts in Irvine have one set Saturday night.
Also tonight, special patrols of Orange County sheriff's deputies are scheduled to flood streets of Dana Point, San Clemente and San Juan Capistrano.
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The “saturation patrols” of the sheriff's DUI Task Force are to be deployed from 7 tonight through 3 a.m. Saturday in areas of the three South County cities with high frequencies of drunken driving-related collisions and/or arrests, according to the agency.
“The goal of the program is to reduce the rate at which the citizens of Orange County are killed or injured in DUI related collisions,” reads a sheriff's statement. “Through implementation of these events, the Orange County Sheriff's Department hopes to significantly reduce deaths, injuries and property damage in each of our contract cities.”
Santa Ana's DUI checkpoint, where officers will also be asking motorists for valid drivers licenses, is to begin at 9 tonight and run through 3 a.m. Saturday in the area of 1500 E. McFadden Ave.
The Irvine Police Department's sobriety checkpoint is scheduled to run from 8 p.m. Saturday through 2 a.m. Sunday in the area of Jamboree Road and Michelson Drive.
Funding for these operations comes from a grant from 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.