Slow traffic Friday evenings in Lake Forest and Costa Mesa is nothing new, but part of the delays on two streets in these cities tonight will be caused by sobriety checkpoints.
Neither location was announced for the Orange County sheriff's operation in Lake Forest from 6 p.m. to 2 a.m. Saturday and the Costa Mesa Police Department's that ends at the same time but starts at 8 p.m.
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By the way, if you're sick and tired of these checkpoints, view them as illegal or just a royal pain in the ass, it sucks to be you.
The sheriff's department and the police department are among several Orange County law enforcement agencies that just announced receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars from the state and federal governments to continue anti-DUI enforcement. Checkpoints are a huge part of that strategy countywide.
“The deterrent effect of DUI checkpoints is a proven resource in reducing the number of persons killed and injured in alcohol- or drug-involved crashes,” reads a statement from the sheriff's department. “Research shows that crashes involving alcohol drop by an average of 20 percent when well-publicized checkpoints are conducted often enough.”
“Over the course of the past three years, DUI collisions have claimed 18 lives and resulted in 525 injuries within the Sheriff's Department's contract cities,” says Deputy Shane Stewart of the sheriff's Traffic Bureau in the same release.
Costa Mesa's checkpoint announcement states that since 2010 there have been 686 collisions involving DUl drivers in in the city that included four fatalities and 307 people injured.
“lt's not until you consider that these numbers represent someone's mother, father, son or daughter that you realize the real impact that DUl drivers are having on our community,” Costa Mesa Police Sgt. Bryan Wadkins says in the statement.
Funding for the checkpoints in both cities comes from a California Office of Traffic Safety grant, 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.