The Costa Mesa Police Department hopes one good sobriety checkpoint deserves another.
From 6 tonight to midnight Thursday, officers will stop vehicles in the 2300 block of Placentia Avenue and check to ensure drivers are licensed and not under the influence of something.
Another operation runs from 6 p.m. Thursday to midnight Friday at Anton Boulevard and Sunflower Avenue.
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“The checkpoint locations were selected because two lives were lost to DUI collisions at these locations over the past three years,” reads a statement from Costa Mesa Police Sgt.
Dave Makiyama. “Since January 2008, DUI collisions in Costa Mesa have killed two people and injured 260 more.”
He warns that those who fail field sobriety tests can expect “jail, vehicle
storage fees, license suspension, insurance rate increases, along
with fines, fees, DUI classes [and] other expenses that can exceed
$10,000.”
As in other cities, the operation is funded a grant from the California Office of Traffic Safety, through the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.
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.