Officers’ time wasted at DWI checkpoints

Houma, LA

Ms. Longwell definitely has a point. It would seem ridiculous for the cops to try to catch bank robbers by standing on the street outside a bank and stopping everyone going inside...after publicizing their plan to catch bank robbers by standing on the street outside the bank and stopping everyone going inside.

Houma police spent a lot of officers’ time and taxpayers’ money last weekend to arrest just nine drunken drivers out of 330 cars stopped and inconvenienced at a DUI checkpoint ("Checkpoint in Houma results in DWI citations for nine drivers," May 10).

That is a meager 2.7 percent success rate.

In the fight to get drunken drivers off the roads, Louisiana law-enforcement agencies would likely make far more arrests if they spent their available patrol time roaming the streets looking for drunken drivers, rather than standing at roadblocks waiting for these drivers to come to them.

Because they are highly visible by design and publicized in advance, roadblocks are all too easily avoided by the chronic alcohol abusers that comprise the core of today’s drunken-driving problem.

Houma residents and taxpayers would benefit from employing the most-effective tactics to catch drunken drivers: roving police patrols.

Sarah Longwell
Managing director
American Beverage Institute
Washington, D.C.

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