A week after the Orange County Sheriff’s Department held rare midweek DUI checkpoints in South County, the Newport Beach Police Department Traffic Division is conducting one of its own tonight.
The location is undisclosed, so everywhere within city limits is in play (except, presumably, the water. Then again, didn’t Rodman getting popped for PUI, as in piloting a boat, back in the day?).
The hours of the Newport Beach ops is 8 p.m. through 2 a.m.
“The Newport Beach Police Department supports the new effort from the [California] Office of Traffic Safety to educate all drivers that ‘DUI Doesn’t Just Mean Booze.’ If you take prescription drugs, particularly those with a warning about driving or operating machinery on the label, you might be impaired enough to be arrested for DUI,” the agency warns in an advisory.
Checkpoint funding comes from an Office of Traffic Safety grant, 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.