Police departments around the Kansas City area and the country spend thousands of dollars a year on DUI checkpoints with similar results. While police defend checkpoints as a great public relations tool against drunken driving, there are better ways to catch drunken drivers, experts say. 

Take saturation patrols, where police cruise city streets in search of swerving cars that may be driven by drunks. They are cheaper to conduct and more efficient — for each car that police officers stop, they are almost four times as likely to catch a drunk.

 

Five of the larger area police departments stopped 25,510 vehicles at checkpoints last year, but only 2,765 during saturation patrols. Both efforts produced arrests — traffic tickets, but also outstanding warrants, drug violations and alcohol-related offenses such as driving with an open container. In fact, saturation patrols yielded more charges — 3,100 — than the number of cars stopped. The total arrest rate for the checkpoints: 2.8 percent. 

And the saturation patrols cost $31.68 per ticket or arrest. The checkpoint price tag? $184.84. 

Taxpayers question checkpoints’ rate of return. Cliff Jones of Raytown reads about checkpoint results when they’re published in the newspaper and wonders if they are an efficient way to catch drunken drivers.

 

Police concede that DUI checkpoints don’t catch a lot of drunken drivers. The statistics don’t reflect the lives saved by those who chose a designated driver because they knew a checkpoint awaited them, they say.

 

“Regardless of how small the number is, you’re still taking a dangerous driver off the street, and that’s still a person who could have injured an innocent driver during their drinking episode,” said Police Capt. Rich Lockhart of Kansas City.