By Jim Nolan and Bill Mckelway
Richmond Times-Dispatch
RICHMOND, Va. — On a moonlit spring evening in Mechanicsville, a detail of Hanover County sheriff’s deputies and state troopers figured the timing was right.
It was Friday, the opening night of the long Memorial Day weekend -- prime time for nailing drunken drivers.
From 11 p.m. until 3 a.m. officers funneled nearly 800 cars through a sobriety checkpoint at the Hanover-Henrico county line on U.S. 360.
More than 100 drivers were questioned and had their licenses checked. Six were arrested on charges of driving under the influence. Ten others were administered breath tests that were positive for alcohol levels within legal limits.
“At first, you get the ones who have been drinking and get really mad because you’ve stopped them from getting home on time,” said a veteran law enforcement officer on the scene.
“Then you get the ones who are more intoxicated and know they’ve been caught. They are the happy-goofy ones.”
Before the evening was over, Hanover deputies had issued 33 summonses and arrested an additional 14 people on other offenses, ranging from drugs to outstanding warrants on immigration violations.
Immobile, expensive and labor-intensive, sobriety checkpoints are the fishing net of roadway law enforcement -- catching everyone who enters but keeping only the violators, including impaired mo- torists.
“DUI road checkpoints, in and of themselves, are not necessarily designed to catch people under the influence,” said Sgt. Rob Netherland, who supervises DUI checkpoints and patrols for Henrico County.
But Netherland and other officials say checkpoints do provide a worthwhile deterrent against people getting behind the wheel after they drink -- a complement to the mobile and focused “saturation patrols,” in which officers hit the road and actively target motorists whose driving suggests they may be under the influence.
“It’s kind of like shock and awe,” Hanover County Sheriff’s Office Sgt. Mike Trice said of checkpoints.
“We’re after the killers of the road, the predators,” said Trice. "[A sobriety checkpoint] garners a lot of attention, and it’s hard to evaluate what you may have prevented just by being out there.”
And when it comes to drinking and driving in Virginia, there are plenty of killers out there.
. . .
In 2006, there were 374 alcohol-related deaths in Virginia -- the highest number since 2002, when there were 375 deaths, according to the Department of Motor Vehicles Highway Safety Office.
In the 20-locality Richmond region, 62 people were killed in alcohol-related motor vehicle fatalities last year. There were also 29,595 DUI convictions in state in 2006 -- the highest numbers in 15 years. State figures show 4,510 people were convicted of DUI in the Richmond region last year.
Not surprisingly, law enforcement officials and anti-drinking groups such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving endorse the use of sobriety checkpoints, which are legal in 39 states and the District of Columbia.
“We support both checkpoints and saturation patrols,” said Chris R. Konschak, the executive director of MADD in Virginia and the District of Columbia.
“If you can get both of them going, you can you can pull some drivers off the road who would otherwise potentially hit and kill, or injure someone else.”
Sobriety checkpoints are not exempt from criticism -- that they are costly, have limited effectiveness and unnecessarily inconvenience law-abiding motorists.
“Sobriety checkpoints are like asking the enemy to come into your camp and surrender,” said Sarah Longwell, spokeswoman for the American Beverage Institute, which represents the restaurant and bar industry and favors roving patrols over checkpoints.
“It’s because they are highly visible, and most seasoned drunk drivers -- and most of them out there driving drunk are -- just go around them,” she added. “They yield a very low actual arrest rate of drunk drivers.”
Area law enforcement agencies conduct sobriety checkpoints on selected occasions but put more emphasis on saturation patrols to catch DUI violators by targeting motorists who drive recklessly, aggressively or at high speeds.
In 2006, Henrico County police conducted eight sobriety checkpoints, resulting in 23 DUI arrests -- a small number compared with the 855 DUI convictions the county recorded that year from arrests on routine patrols and other anti-drinking initiatives.
The Hanover Sheriff’s Office ran four sobriety checkpoints in 2006, yielding 12 DUI arrests. The county recorded 337 DUI convictions that year.
Four sobriety checkpoints run by Richmond Police last year netted three DUI arrests in a city that recorded 590 DUI convictions, though officers made 170 arrests on related and unrelated offenses.
Though checkpoint arrest numbers are a small portion of overall DUI convictions in the larger counties in the region, officials said the primary goal of a checkpoint is deterrence, not racking up DUI arrests.
On many occasions, the checkpoints are extensively publicized.
“They are more about the perception that we’re out there,” said Netherland, the Henrico police sergeant. “It’s a deterrent.”
“We get more DUI-related arrests [with saturation patrols] because the officers know exactly what they are looking for,” he said.
Sobriety checkpoints aren’t cheap, requiring a substantial amount of manpower and resources -- the primary reason the operations are often conducted around busy travel days and holidays.
For example, the Hanover checkpoint on May 25 involved more than a dozen Hanover deputies, two reserve officers and five troopers from the Virginia State Police, who work with local jurisdictions in dozens of sobriety checkpoints across the state each year.
Hanover estimated its cost for running the four-hour checkpoint at $1,600, plus the cost of the state police officers, who account for their time separately. The checkpoint was funded by federal grant money.
“It’s less expensive to do a saturation patrol,” said Hanover Sgt. Drew Darby, who supervised the May 25 checkpoint. “You don’t use as many people, but you can cover a wider area.”
Unlike checkpoints, which can require a dozen or more officers to stop traffic and check hundreds of vehicles, saturation patrols can involve as few as two or three officers whose focus is on identifying impaired motorists. Darby said a typical saturation patrol involving two officers could cost around $300.
Most jurisdictions depend on National Highway Transportation Safety Administration grants distributed by the state, and funding from nonprofits, to sponsor the overtime costs and additional equipment needed for checkpoints.
The Department of Motor Vehicles last year awarded more than $3.4 million in highway safety grants to Virginia localities. The 20-locality Richmond region received more than $500,000 in funding, earmarked for checkpoints and other highway safety initiatives.
The state police, which patrols interstate highways and assumes policing duties in many rural counties in the state, conducted nearly 281 saturation patrols between July and December last year as part of the federally funded Checkpoint Strikeforce program, spokeswoman Corinne Geller said.
Officials said saturation patrols might be more precise when it comes to catching people who are driving under the influence.
“Obviously one of the key indicators of DUIs is driving behavior,” said Maj. John Austin of the Chesterfield County Police Department, which ran eight sobriety checkpoints and 321 saturation patrols in 2006 as part of its DUI strategy, resulting in 1,212 convictions last year, the most in the region according to the DMV.
“So being able to observe people driving is a way for us to detect that. When you do a DUI checkpoint, obviously you’re dependent on the vehicles that are coming through that location,” Austin added.
“At least with the saturation patrols, you have the opportunity to be much more mobile and cover larger areas of territory, as well as probably observe more vehicles.”
. . .
That night at the Hanover checkpoint, responsibility seemed to be in short supply.
The roadside parking lot resembled an accumulation of mutterings, bitter oaths, weaving flesh and plaintive squeals against a backdrop of flashing lights and idling squad cars.
“My girlfriend’s had too much to drink for them to let her drive,” said one man whose friend was being held temporarily because she had an elevated, but not illegal, alcohol level in her blood. Asked why he didn’t get behind the wheel in her place, the man responded frankly:
“Because I’m way more drunk than she is.”
Another woman in handcuffs insisted she’d had only a single beer as she leaned against her car for support. “But my babies are at home asleep!” she wailed in protest.
Konschak said regardless of how law enforcement approaches the problem, the aim is the same.
“Our goal is just to get drunk drivers off the road,” he said.
Every day, however, there are reminders that the job is far from over.
Just two weeks after the Memorial Day checkpoint, Darby was sitting in the parking lot of the Virginia Credit Union on U.S. 360 when he saw a man run his pickup truck into the curb of the ATM lane and pull past the machine.
The man then got of the truck, opened the hatch to the gas tank and removed the cap.
“He was trying to figure out where the nozzle was on the ATM,” said Darby, recalling the incident.
Darby ended up arresting the man on a charge of driving under the influence, at more than three times the legal limit.
Staff writer Mark Bowes contributed to this report.
Copyright 2007 The Richmond Times-Dispatch