DWI arrests are through the roof, but roads aren't getting much safer ...

Cars line up in the curve leading to Orleans Avenue lakebound as New Orleans police officers conduct a DWI checkpoint on Basin Street on Sept. 21. (Photo by Michael DeMocker, NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune)

To hear Police Superintendent Ronal Serpas tell it, there is no greater threat to a law-abiding citizen's life than a drunk driver. New Orleans may be America's murder capital, but the police chief often notes that murder victims have usually been involved in some kind of criminal activity. It's different with DWI.

"A drunk driver is that stranger that you've never laid eyes on in your life that crosses the center line and annihilates you and your family," Serpas said, noting that national data suggests about 2 percent of all drivers at any given time are impaired. "That's a two-ton roving gun on the streets just waiting for some terrible accident to happen."

Pervasive across America, drunk driving is an especially serious problem in south Louisiana, with its historically permissive mores regarding alcohol. Serpas and some of his suburban counterparts have sought to change that, embarking on a jihad against DWI in the past few years. The NOPD has used grant money to buy mobile sobriety-testing vans and pay overtime for officers to work dragnets, while in Jefferson Parish, Sheriff Newell Normand has implemented "no refusal" checkpoints, which means police can draw blood from drivers who try to refuse a breathalyzer or who are suspected of being on drugs.

It's working, at least on the arrest side of the ledger. In New Orleans, arrests have more than doubled in the last four years. Arrests by the Jefferson Parish Sheriff's Office have more than tripled in that time. And State Police Troop B, which spans metro New Orleans south of Lake Pontchartrain, has nearly doubled its DWI arrest rate. St. Charles and St. Bernard parishes have also seen considerable increases.

Within those numbers are people of all ages and backgrounds -- politicians, doctors, professors -- and even Mayor Mitch Landrieu's underage son. Serpas' son has been arrested for DWI twice.

But whether the stepped-up enforcement is making the streets any safer is hard to say. Officials acknowledge that the number of crashes involving impaired drivers that resulted in death or injury has remained stubbornly high amid the crackdown.

Last year, 13 people were killed and 351 were injured in drunk-driving crashes in Orleans Parish, compared with 15 killed and 243 injured in 2007. In Jefferson Parish, the numbers have dropped slightly in recent years, though drunk driving-related fatalities still accounted for 67 percent of all traffic deaths in 2011. That's twice as high as the national rate.

Authorities say they're doing all they can on their end. But they can't make people stop drinking and driving.

"Sometimes fate just happens," Serpas said. "You know you come to work, you do the very best job you can, and sometimes things just happen you can't control. You still got hard-headed people."

St. Tammany bucks the trend

An interesting counter-trend is happening in St. Tammany Parish. Though the parish is known for strict law enforcement, DWI arrests have actually fallen by almost half even as they've doubled or tripled elsewhere in the region. Meanwhile, alcohol-related fatalities have dropped by half, too, from 23 in 2007 to 11 in 2011.

Those numbers, St. Tammany Sheriff Jack Strain said, can be attributed to his emphasis on educating the public about DWI. He places ads in the media and visits social functions and high schools to relate drunk-driving horror stories.

But Strain said his deputies also are trained to use discretion in deciding which drivers are most dangerous to public safety. They weigh a variety of factors: the initial traffic violation, the driver's apparent level of impairment, the driver's record and even the reason for drinking.

"We don't want to arrest every person who drives through our parish," Strain said. "We're there to get the guy who's truly impaired and not the husband and wife who have just celebrated their 20th anniversary over a bottle of wine."

Louisiana is No. 4 in nation

While the impact of the DWI crackdown on public safety is difficult to gauge, it's undeniable that drinking and driving is a major public health problem in Louisiana. In June, a 30-year-old fourth-offense drunk driver crashed his pickup truck into a car in East Feliciana Parish, killing a family of seven, including four children.

Louisiana's rate of drunk-driving fatalities is the fourth-highest in the country. Nearly half of the roughly 700 fatalities in Louisiana each year are because of impaired driving, compared with one in three nationally. Most impairment is caused by alcohol, authorities say, though marijuana and prescription drugs are growing nearly as common.

"Down here, we have a long history of alcohol abuse. We're the clowns that brought you the drive-through daiquiri shop," said Martin Thibodeaux, a 30-year licensed substance abuse counselor who, until recently, taught a court-ordered class for first-time DWI offenders in New Orleans. "What people here fail to understand is that impairment starts with the first drink."

Having a few pops before getting behind the wheel is less frowned upon in Louisiana than in other parts of the country, experts say.

"In Louisiana, we drink and drive. It's cultural," said Kenneth Trull, deputy director of the Louisiana Highway Safety Commission, which funnels about $3.1 million in federal grants to parish authorities, with the aim of bringing Louisiana drivers into sober compliance. The bulk of the money goes toward beefing up patrols, conducting sobriety checkpoints and publicizing police efforts.

Publicity, penalties

Publicizing DWI enforcement is nearly as important as the enforcement itself, said Dr. Barron Lerner, public health historian at New York University School of Medicine and author of "One for the Road: Drunk Driving since 1900."

"The one thing that's been shown consistently is that if people think they're going to get caught, they're less likely to drive drunk," Lerner said. Broadcasting messages like "drive sober or get pulled over" and "they'll see you before you see them," the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration started heavily advertising in 2006 that it was partnering with local police to crack down on drunk drivers.

Such campaigns can make a difference. Since the 1980s, Lerner said, drunk-driving deaths have fallen nationally from about 25,000 to around 11,000 today. While some of the decline may owe to safer vehicles and wider use of seat belts, the drop owes largely to the passage and enforcement of harsher DWI laws -- for instance, lowering the legal limit to 0.08 percent, and increasing penalties for repeat offenders and drivers with higher levels of impairment.

Louisiana has also adopted harsher DWI penalties in recent years, but those penalties are not always enforced, said Floyd Johnson, the Louisiana executive director of Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

MADD has monitored courts across the state and found that judges often shy away from imposing harsh sentences on DWI offenders. Judges tend to dole out lighter punishments when MADD monitors are not in the room, Johnson said. Louisiana judges particularly hesitate to mandate ignition-interlock devices, which can cost the offender thousands of dollars and are supposed to be required for multiple offenders and those arrested with higher levels of impairment, Johnson said.

"From a victim's standpoint, that's a drop in the bucket to losing a loved one," Johnson said.

Also, Louisiana, unlike other states, allows DWI offenders to wipe their slate clean if they don't get arrested again for drunken-driving for 10 years, which makes it possible for one person to be arrested multiple times for a first-offense DWI.

That makes it hard, Johnson said, to know sometimes how many times a drunk driver has been arrested. In the East Feliciana case, for example, authorities still aren't sure whether the accused driver had been arrested for DWI three or four times before the night he allegedly killed seven innocent people.

One of MADD's top priorities in Louisiana is creating a statewide DWI database to prevent such issues, Johnson said.

The last six NOPD checkpoints in 2012 have yielded between three and 10 DWI arrests, according to records provided by the Police Department. Even if those numbers seem small, Serpas said, it's impossible to count how many drivers chose not to drive drunk because they heard about the NOPD's stepped-up DWI enforcement.

"We may not know which car that we're going to interrupt, whether that person's going to go home and commit a crime against a family member," Serpas said. "We do know every time we stop a drunk driver, we've saved a life."

Creating awareness

Even with all the resources being deployed to fight drunk driving, authorities acknowledge there are far more drunk drivers than they'll ever be able to pull over. "We only know who we catch," Jefferson Parish Sheriff Newell Normand said. "There's so many people you don't catch. When we set up a checkpoint, we're on a particular road on a particular day, but somewhere else in the parish, there's someone driving around drunk."

According to MADD, by the time someone gets caught for his or her first DWI, they have driven drunk an average of 87 times. In part because of that sobering stat, MADD supports the checkpoints, regardless of how many arrests they net.

"If nothing else, it creates awareness and impacts the people who are being arrested," Johnson said. "Hopefully, their friends and family members can learn through their mistakes. Hopefully, it influences people to think before they go out and drink, to plan before how to get home."

DWI arrests can change a person's behavior. A 21-year-old Loyola University business student who was arrested on suspicion of driving drunk after crashing into a parked car Uptown said the threat of acquiring a criminal record that would hurt his job prospects was enough.

"I got it expunged, but it could come back to haunt me if I got another," said the student, who spoke to The Times-Picayune on condition of anonymity. "It would be a huge problem if I had it on my record. It's definitely not worth it. I just don't drink and drive anymore."

For others, the sheer cost of fighting a DWI is enough of a deterrent. Bail, lawyers and court fees will usually amount to at least $2,500, officials say. One first-time offender, Shelby Roberson, 37, an offshore deck foreman, said getting rid of his DWI cost him about $20,000 after he added up the fees and his missed work time.

Then there's the intangible cost: A DWI arrest may sometimes mean losing the respect of co-workers, or being shunned by family.

"You gotta look at your grandkids and your wife and they look at you like, 'You're bad, grandpa's a drunk,'" said Morris Martin, who was a 60-year-old cab driver when he was arrested on a DWI charge on St. Claude Avenue.

But some -- especially those who admit to having an alcohol problem -- say getting nabbed for DWI had no effect on their behavior.

Now sober, Hudson Marquez, 65, says he continued driving drunk long after he was arrested on a DWI charge on Broadway in 2002. "The arrest had absolutely no effect on me," he said. "I was a binge drinker. For 40 years, I drove drunk and got away with it."

Source: http://www.nola.com/crime/index.ssf/2012/10/dwi_arrests_through_the_roof_b.html

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