California’s Office of Traffic Safety (OTS) has declared 2010 (drum roll please) “The Year of the Checkpoint.”

It’s great that California wants to get drunk drivers off the roads. But, a hyped-up, waste-of-money checkpoints push isn’t the way to do it. Just look at the results of California’s 2008 roadblock campaign: over a million vehicles went through 1,469 checkpoints. Police arrested just one-third of 1 percent of those motorists for drunk driving.

And 2009 doesn’t look much better. Checkpoints in Barstow, Costa Mesa, Fairfield, Fort Bragg, Orange County, Redding, Ripon, San Francisco, San Rafael, and Ukiah caught zero drunk drivers. Checkpoints in Coachella, Clovis, Folsom, Fresno, Martinez, Norco, Palm Springs, Petaluma, Porterville, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Luis Obispo, and Santa Maria made just 1 arrest each, and stopped thousands upon thousands of innocent drivers in the process.

If you’re thinking 1 arrest is better than nothing, think about this: saturation patrols in Alameda County, Fontana, North County, San Bernardino, and Visalia caught anywhere from 6 to 47 drunk drivers each.

Checkpoints are just PR stunts – a way to look like you’re cracking down, when really you’re just standing around. But, that won’t stop the OTS from going into spin mode:

Since OTS and law enforcement began placing increased emphasis and funding toward sobriety checkpoints in 2006, alcohol-related deaths have declined in California. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s (NHTSA) Fatality Analysis Reporting System, DUI deaths declined in California by 9.1 percent between 2007 and 2008, marking a total decrease of nearly 21 percent from the most recent high point in 2005.

As we’ve pointed out, anyone calling the drop in fatalities in 2008 more than a fluke is fooling themselves. Or maybe they’re just fooling you.

We can’t make this stuff up.

A police department in Wisconsin has proposed holding “voluntary sobriety checkpoints,” in which motorists can choose to be screened or avoid it. The Police Chief in charge of the proposed stunt, Kevin Wilkinson, said “he hopes at least one in 10 motorists will stop.” We won’t hold our breath.

You see, sobriety checkpoints are illegal in Wisconsin because state law says that officers only can detain motorists based on a reasonable suspicion of a violation. So, why would the police chief – the highest authority on stopping crime and keeping residents safe – station a dozen officers at a voluntary checkpoint that will be easily avoided by every single criminal? Supposedly to serve as a (surprise, surprise) PR gimmick:

“He said the aim of the program is not necessarily to see how many drunken drivers police can intercept. Rather, it is to send a message to motorists that Neenah is a risky place to drive drunk.”

If you thought that checkpoints already have a poor record for making drunk driving arrests, just wait until this silly program kicks off.

If Neenah police want to get serious about drunk driving, they should beef up roving patrols, not dream up fruitless PR stunts.

UPDATE: See today’s follow-up story that mentions this blog post.

ABI started a campaign against sobriety checkpoints last week prior to the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. So far, our efforts have resulted in a story on CBSnews.com, articles in the Courier-Times and News-Post, and stories on NBC and CBS affiliates in California, Florida, Maine, Mississippi, and Virginia. In addition, the Kansas City Star, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, and the New Jersey’s Courier Post published ABI op-eds against checkpoints.

On Sunday, California’s Daily Breeze newspaper ran a letter to the editor from Gary Meyer challenging ABI’s claim that sobriety checkpoints waste time and money:

The same Breeze edition also contained an article about a sobriety checkpoint in Hawthorne in which 234 vehicles were impounded as a result of unlicensed drivers and unregistered and uninsured cars. 234 cars!

…These checkpoints obviously remove more hazards from the roadway than the drunken driver alone.

We hear Mr. Meyer’s argument a lot and it’s not only wrongheaded, but unconstitutional.

In 1990, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the severity of the drunk driving problem (at that time) outweighed concerns of intrusion to motorists at sobriety checkpoints.

No one can seriously dispute the magnitude of the drunken driving problem or the States’ interest in eradicating it…

Conversely, the weight bearing on the other scale — the measure of the intrusion on motorists stopped briefly at sobriety checkpoints — is slight.

-  Michigan Department of State Police v. Sitz, No. 88-1897

It is well-recognized that the purpose of checkpoints is to observe driver sobriety, not impound vehicles of unlicensed motorists or write tickets for broken taillights.

In fact, in that very opinion, Chief Justice Rhenquist noted that:

In Delaware v. Prouse, supra, we disapproved random stops made by Delaware Highway Patrol officers in an effort to apprehend unlicensed drivers and unsafe vehicles. We observed that no empirical evidence indicated that such stops would be an effective means of promoting roadway safety.