COLUMBUS, Ohio – As the summer travel season draws to a close with one of the biggest holiday weekends of the year, Ohio law enforcement agencies are mounting a two-week crackdown on impaired driving.
The national Drive Sober or Get Pulled Over campaign is a program organized by the U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and focuses on combining high-visibility enforcement with heightened public awareness.
The campaign began Aug. 15 and continues through Labor Day on Sept. 1
In 2013, 341 people died in 309 OVI-related crashes on Ohio’s roads and impaired drivers accounted for more than one-third of the fatal traffic crashes, Ohio Department of Public Safety Director John Born said.
“Our goal is to present an unmistakable show of force, ready to arrest drunk drivers who put lives at risk. During the enforcement period, more than 99 law enforcement partners have planned more than 8,400 enforcement hours,” he said.
Throughout the year, Born says, someone is killed in an alcohol-impaired-driving crash every 51 minutes and that statistic jumps to one fatality every 34 minutes over the Labor Day weekend. Almost half of all nighttime traffic fatalities involving a drunk driver happen during the Labor Day weekend.
Several central Ohio law enforcement agencies are planning increased enforcement, as well as activities aimed at raising awareness of the problem of impaired driving:
In addition to drunk driving, officers will also be looking for signs of drug use. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says drugs like marijuana and cocaine are a factor in nearly one-fifth of motor vehicle driver deaths.
Columbus Division of Police will use a three-pronged approach: a greater presence of marked cruisers, sobriety checkpoints and the use of a mobile impaired driving processing vehicle, equipped with equipment to measure blood-alcohol levels, that will be available to all law enforcement agencies in the Columbus metropolitan area to speed up the process of making impaired driving arrest,” Traffic Bureau Sgt. Michael Smith said.
Smith says those measures are made possible through federal grant funding awarded by the Ohio Traffic Safety Office.
Columbus police will also employ intermittent judicial “no-refusal” periods when motorists arrested for impaired driving who refuse to provide evidence as required by Ohio law will have that evidence taken once a judge authorizes a search warrant, Smith said.
The Franklin County DUI Task Force is hosting an event at 3:00 p.m. on Aug. 16 at Grand Prix Karting, 1300 Alum Creek Drive, featuring the mobile blood alcohol concentration. Visitors will be also get the chance to try to drive a race car simulator while using “fatal vision goggles” that imitate the effects of drinking and driving.