With the holiday festivities heating up, Washington metropolitan area police are cracking down on drunken drivers.
Arlington County police are working overtime to target drunken drivers, Montgomery County police are setting up DUI checkpoints and D.C. police are increasing patrols in areas that have a history of alcohol-related incidents. The added enforcement is designed to discourage motorists from drinking and driving and to take those who do off the roads.
“Drinking and driving is dangerous,” said Arlington County police spokesman John Lyle. “It’s dangerous to the driver and it’s dangerous to everybody else on the streets.”
According to the Washington Regional Alcohol Program, the number of alcohol-related traffic deaths in the Metropolitan area has decreased while the number of DUI arrests increased. Last year there were 86 alcohol-related fatal crashes, compared to 110 in 2004. DUI arrests for the region rose 2 percent to 15,232 arrests.
Regional fines for first-time offenders range from $250 to $2,500, but the overall expense when including attorney fees, court costs, bail, towing fees and alcohol programs can cost from $5,000 to $20,000, according to Kurt Erickson, president of WRAP.
A DUI checkpoint in Wheaton over the weekend yielded nine DUI and two drug arrests. A concentration of traffic enforcement patrols in Bethesda yielded 15 DUI arrests.
This year U.S. Park Police officer Adam Zielinski, 36, has arrested than 115 drunken drivers on his 21-mile stretch of the Baltimore-Washington Parkway. Zielinski works the 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. shift and averages about two drunken-driving arrests a night. About 60 percent of his DUI arrests stem from speeding stops. Other times, the arrests come after he spots a vehicle weaving out of its lane, traveling without proper tags or driving without its headlights on. Sometimes other motorists call police about a speeding or erratic driver. Zielinski will have drunken driving suspects follow the path of a pen with their eyes. Wobbly eyes are often a sign that the driver had been drinking.
“You’d be surprised how prominently their eyes bounce,” he said.
On Friday night Zielinski responded to a rollover of a speeding car. The driver was taken to an area hospital and Zielinski questioned a friend who had been following in another car. Zielinski suspected that the second driver had been drinking and administered a field sobriety test. Theman failed and was arrested for DUI.
