Criminal Law News

The Concord Police Department has announced that it will conduct a revenue collection exercise, er, sobriety checkpoint this weekend. The checkpoint will last between 7:30 PM Saturday to 3:30 AM on Sunday. No locations have been made public. Motorists will be stopped at random, and officers will check for signs of intoxication.According to the Concord Police Department, the aim of the checkpoint is to educate drivers about the risks of driving while intoxicated, and to arrest impaired drivers.

You can’t blame California DUI lawyers for being skeptical about these frequent sobriety checkpoints. California DUI checkpoints have become suspect ever since it was revealed that the checkpoints ended up with more numbers of cars seized for driving without a license, than for drunk driving. Many checkpoints have turned into revenue making centers, where police officers arrest people driving under a suspended license or no license at all, and impound the vehicle. Millions of dollars have been generated as thousands of cars have been impounded. The number of actual drunk driving offenders who have been pulled over at these checkpoints, have been too low to even warrant a checkpoint at all.

This isn’t a phenomenon that’s excusive to California, by any measure. In other states around the country, populist measures like sobriety checkpoints and red light camera systems have turned into revenue generation measures for the police departments in these cities. In California’s case, most of these checkpoints are focused around ethnic minority neighborhoods where there more likely to be unlicensed motorists.

The entire exercise of dedicating large numbers of police officers to conduct a sobriety checkpoint, and then ending up with three drunk driving offenders and large numbers of cars belonging to unlicensed drivers, seems like a sham to Los Angeles DUI attorneys. California, in particular, has managed to dedicate massive amounts of funds to such efforts, which do very little to actually tackle the problem of drunk driving in the state. The numbers of sobriety checkpoints in the state are expected to increase in 2010, as anti-DUI programs get flush with funds from state and federal agencies.