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Agencies to make concerted effort to stop drunken drivers
A celebrated bicyclist out for a ride July 9 on 5 Mile Road was killed by an alleged drunk driver.
A husband and father of 5 children was on his way to work June 3 in Kenosha when his vehicle was hit head on by a man who has been charged with drunken driving.
They are among six people killed in Racine County since March because of alcohol-related traffic crashes, accounting for more than half the county’s fatal collisions in that time period.
Drunken driving is not just a bad decision made by an impaired person. Driving intoxicated is the kind of crime that can have life-altering and life-ending results.
For the next few weeks, law enforcement agencies across the county will attempt to get that message out as they concentrate their efforts on getting drunken drivers off the road.
As of this weekend, the Racine and Mount Pleasant police departments and the Racine County Sheriff’s Department have assigned extra patrol officers to high traffic areas specifically looking for impaired drivers. It’s part of a nationwide intensive crackdown called “Drunk Driving. Over the Limit. Under Arrest.”
“The idea is to make the roadways safer for everyone,” said Mount Pleasant Police Chief Tim Zarzecki.
Racine Police Department spokesman Sgt. Bernie Kupper said the effort is aimed at bringing awareness to drunken driving. The desire is for people to think before they get behind the wheel after they’ve been consuming alcohol.
“The (police) presence gives you an awakening to your responsibility to drive safely,” he said. “The goal is not to make an example of people by arresting them, but to bring awareness to a problem that is considered an unacceptable form of behavior.”
The three departments participating have been given grant money through the Department of Transportation’s Bureau of Transportation Safety to pay for the extra patrols.
Third shift officers and deputies have been assigned to specifically target drunken drivers on weekend nights since May, but there will be additional patrols from now until Labor Day. Those officers don’t respond to other calls for service, but concentrate their efforts on looking for impaired drivers.
In addition, other local law enforcement agencies will also be assigning officers to do similar patrols to help in the effort.
Kupper compared the enforcement to an advertising blitz. He said one patrol officer out on the road every day looking for intoxicated drivers might apprehend a few over the course of the year. A concentrated effort brings in more impaired drivers and gives law enforcement greater exposure.
“If we don’t advertise that we’re out there, we lose some of the value of the resources we’re putting out there,” he said.
The patrols will be done in areas where drunken drivers are likely to be traveling.
“We’re going to concentrate our efforts in areas where there is increased traffic,” Zarzecki said.
They’ll also be out during peak times for alcohol consumption, Kupper said. In the city, that means between 11 p.m. and 3 a.m.
Representatives from the local departments participating in the national crackdown attended a kickoff to the event last week in Middleton.
Kupper said some of the statistics he brought back from the meeting “are staggering numbers.”
* A first offender has probably driven intoxicated 50 times before being caught.
* Twenty-six percent of Wisconsin drivers admit to having driven drunk in the past 12 months.
* Fourty-two percent of crashes in Wisconsin are OWI-related. The national average is 32 percent.
* For every person arrested for OWI, it is believed that there are 200 more who don’t get caught.