A good barometer of how effective the enormous effort to reduce drunken driving is the number of arrests for DWI. Statewide in New York, the number has dropped the past seven years, according to data released this month by the state Division of Criminal Justice Services.

Across the state, arrests for intoxication by alcohol or drugs dropped from 43,887 in 2013 to 41,752 last year.

RID attributes the decrease to both law enforcement and greater public awareness. Specifically, New York State utilizes checkpoints as being part of the efforts for deterring drunken driving.  For the past few years, Albany County, has been aggressively staging check points on the entry points to our highways  where alcohol consumption has been closely associated with certain events and holidays.

Although these efforts by law enforcement continue to yield dozens of arrests, the fact that overall DWI arrests are down is a positive development. The U.S. Supreme Court considered the legality of sobriety checkpoints in the case of Michigan v. Sitz. In Sitz, The Court found that checkpoints constitute a seizure for Fourth Amendment purposes but that sobriety checkpoints are reasonable and permissible under certain conditions, despite the fact that the law generally forbids law enforcement officers from stopping drivers unless there is a suspicion that the drivers have violated the law. The Court found that that the dangers posed by drunk driving outweighed the Fourth Amendment intrusion. Many jurisdictions that conduct sobriety checkpoints require the checkpoint to be publicized. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has its own guidelines on sobriety checkpoints and encourages agencies to aggressively publicize the checkpoints.

There are positive and negative results from publicizing checkpoints. There is benefit in showing the public that law enforcement is taking this issue seriously by devoting its resources in this manner. Some skeptics might conclude that announcing the checkpoints in advance merely gives the drunken driver a heads-up on how to avoid arrest. In any case, checkpoints should continue to be an key component in making the roads and highways we share safer for everyone.