See the update at the end of this post on revised winter holiday period DUI arrest stats.
ORIGINAL POST, DEC. 21, 8:56 A.M.: The Costa Mesa and Garden Grove police departments are conducting DUI checkpoints tonight, while one goes up in Huntington Beach Saturday night. None of the agencies is revealing the location of the mandatory motorist stops aimed at removing impaired and unlicensed drivers from the road.
Times of each respective op and “Avoid the 38” task force winter enforcement stats as of last weekend are after the jump . . .
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Up first is Costa Mesa, where the checkpoint runs from 7 tonight through 2 a.m. Saturday. Garden Grove's is from 9 tonight through 3 a.m. Saturday. Saturation patrols, which have officers flooding streets known for drunken driving arrests, crashes and fatalities, were previously announced to run from 8 tonight through 3 a.m. Saturday by the Orange Police Department, in Los Alamitos by the Orange County Sheriff's Department and on the campus of UC Irvine.
Surf City starts stopping motorists at its checkpoint at 9 p.m. Saturday. Police in Anaheim, Placentia, Buena Park, La Habra and at Cal State Fullerton are scheduled to run saturation patrols from 8 p.m. Saturday through 3 a.m. Sunday.
Anaheim, Placentia and Buena Park have checkpoints scheduled from 7 p.m. Saturday, Dec. 29, through 3 a.m. Dec. 30.
Saturation patrols are also set from 8 p.m. Monday through 3 a.m. Tuesday in Fullerton, from 8 p.m. Monday, Dec. 31, to 3 a.m. Jan. 1 in Placentia and throughout the winter enforcement period in Tustin, Irvine, La Palma, Laguna Beach and the communities patrolled by the sheriff's department.
From 12:01 a.m. on Friday, Dec. 14, through midnight last Sunday, officers from the county's 38 law enforcement agencies made 158 arrests for suspected driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs, according to the multi-agency “Avoid the 38” task force, which gladly adds no DUI deaths were reported over those days.
Five people were arrested Monday at the Harbor Justice Center in Newport Beach, where the sheriff's department ran a sting operation targeting people in court for a suspended driver's license because of a prior DUI. After their hearings, these defendants were followed out to the parking lot by plainclothes officers, and if those with suspended licenses got behind the wheel and drove away, the undercovers radioed to patrolled officers who pulled the cars over and cited the motorists, who were then released.
And in need of rides.
Cop shops rely on funding from grants from the California Office of
Traffic Safety, through the National Highway Traffic Safety
Administration, to pay for these various anti-DUI ops.
UPDATED, DEC. 26, 9:29 A.M.: 411 arrests for being drunk or druggy while driving were made by some of Orange County's 38 law enforcement agencies from 12:01 a.m. Dec. 14 through midnight Friday, “Avoid the 38” announced.
The task force notes that's a provisional total for that period as not all agencies had reported in as of the announcement being made.
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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.