Police Saturation Patrol for New Year’s Eve
Instead of staffing sobriety checkpoints on New Year’s Eve, more Santa Maria Police officers are patrolling the streets looking for DUI drivers.
“We’re out here, that’s what we are doing, we are saturating the city with extra patrols of officers”, says SMPD Sgt. Mark Streker, “being proactive, trying to prevent a DUI accident.”
Sgt. Streker shares what he and his fellow officers are looking for while out on “saturation” patrol.
“As I approach an intersection I will look for vehicles running red lights”, Streker says, “I will look for vehicles pulling out of parking lots without enough time for other vehicles to yield, that’s often a tell-tale sign of a DUI driver, one of the most tell-tale signs is DUI drivers driving with their headlights off.”
On a night like New Year’s Eve, Streker says its inevitable arrests will be made but points out there are simply not enough officers to prevent DUI accidents.
“A lot of times what will happen is we will end up with a DUI arrest out of a DUI accident, so those we get there after the fact”, Streker says.
“The last thing that any police officer wants to have to do is go knock on some parent’s door at 2 o’clock in the morning and any type of notification that their child has been killed in a car accident”, Streker says, “I’ll tell you this right now, it is without a doubt one of the worst parts of this job if you’ve had to do it and its something you don’t ever forget and its something you don’t want to ever have to do.”
Streker says DUI arrests statewide are falling every year thanks in part to extra police patrols and sobriety checkpoints that are funded in large part with grants from the California Office of Traffic Safety.
“I was looking at some numbers over the last ten years and statewide, not just citywide, statewide, and the number of DUI arrests has gone down”, Streker says, “the number of officers haven’t gone down, the number of drivers has gone up yet the number of arrests have gone down and that tells me people are much, much more congnizant of it, they are making a responsible move and they are getting a designated driver.”
