Unprecedented declines in the drinking-and-driving problem occurred during the 1980s. Based on declining trends in the percent of fatalities that were alcohol-related, progress continued through the 1990s, although the gains were far less impressive. In the new millennium, data from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) revealed that alcohol impaired-driving fatalities in crashes involving drivers with blood alcohol concentrations (BACs) of at least .08 gram per deciliter (g/dL) declined by 27 percent from 13,582 in 2005 to 9,967 in 2014. More recently, from 2013 to 2014, fatalities in such alcohol-impaired-driving crashes decreased by 1.4 percent (10,110 to 9,967 fatalities). Looking at the number of fatalities by 100 million vehicle miles traveled (VMT), there has also been a reduction of 27% from 0.45 in 2005 to 0.33 in 2014. While there are notable reductions in absolute numbers and according to the VMT rate, reductions in terms of the proportion of fatalities in alcohol-impaired driving crashes out of all crashes are not immediately apparent. To illustrate, in 2014, this was 31 percent of total traffic fatalities and this percentage has not declined significantly. This phenomenon of stagnated progress has not been exclusive to the United States. It has also occurred in other jurisdictions, including some in Canada, Australia, and Europe. Research has demonstrated that enforcement can be a very effective way to combat alcohol-impaired driving, especially high visibility enforcement through publicized sobriety checkpoints, as well as high visibility saturation patrols. In light of the magnitude of the problem and the need for continued progress, this report describes solutions to improve the efficiency of the arrest process for driving while impaired (DWI), especially as it relates to saving time and/or costs. This is particularly timely given how time-consuming the DWI arrest process has become. To illustrate, a report based on data collected among 2,731 law enforcement officers from both State and local agencies with the support of the Highway Safety Committee of the International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) concluded that law enforcement officers believed the DWI arrest process was complex, detail-laden, and time-consuming. Law enforcement officers reported that making an arrest had become so onerous that it was often frustrating, discouraging, and even intimidating to some officers. It further reported that police believed new technological applications such as mobile computers, computerized forms, bar-code readers and digital dictation systems could improve the efficiency and effectiveness with which they enforce DWI laws. A study by the Volpe Institute about this issue based on an exploration of new and emerging technologies drew similar conclusions. Technological applications can enable law enforcement to better address the concerns they face with respect to their resources (budgetary and manpower) by reducing the labor associated with processing DWI arrests. Overall, these applications can yield savings in time, energy, resources and funds associated with the DWI arrest process. For example, a streamlined arrest process enables officers to devote more of their time in the field to enforce the law and detect alcohol-impaired drivers. A streamlined arrest process can produce positive residual effects such as increasing the motivation of officers to initiate DWI detection/arrests as well as improving the safety of these officers on the road. In addition, automating the DWI arrest process can potentially increase the accuracy of data collection and reduce errors that result from the transposition of characters and incomplete entries. Furthermore, improvements in the timeliness and accuracy of collected DWI data can help ensure that prosecutors have sufficient evidence to secure a conviction. In a 2015 study, State and local law enforcement agencies were surveyed about their DWI enforcement activities. According to this study, when asked about the biggest challenges their agencies faced in conducting DWI enforcement, staffing was cited by 56 percent of agencies, lack of funding by 24 percent of agencies, and excessive paperwork by 6 percent, further emphasizing the need for more efficient solutions to process DWI arrests. This report is meant to provide an overview of solutions that can help reduce the time and cost associated with conducting an arrest. The objectives of this study are to identify law enforcement agencies that have made improvements to their DWI arrest procedures that have resulted in time and/or cost savings, and gather data from these jurisdictions to describe any such savings experienced as a result of these improvements. The improvements, their resulting time and cost savings, as well as experiences regarding the implementation of these improvements are described in this report and used to inform the development of a roadmap that other agencies can rely upon if they are interested in implementing these types of solutions. The goals of this study are to: - Determine what strategies law enforcement agencies are using to reduce the cost and/or time of processing a DWI arrest; - Identify law enforcement agencies that have made such improvements; - Gather data to describe and quantify the cost and/or time savings associated with these processes; - Capture the experiences of States/local agencies in undertaking these improvements; and - Combine these results into a report that assists other agencies in adopting these types of strategies. Section 1.0 (Introduction) of this report presents the Problem Statement and Objectives for this study. It also outlines the structure of this report. Section 2.0 (Background) of this report contains a brief review of the literature and a description of the results from consultations with a few experts about time and cost saving strategies relevant to the DWI arrest process. Section 3.0 (Method) provides a brief overview of the methods used to collect current data on efficient DWI arrest processes, and strategies used by a selection of agencies in the country (see Appendix A for a more complete description). Section 4.0 (Results) describes the programs or strategies used in each agency that participated in this study. Section 5.0 (Conclusions) presents summary statements. Section 6.0 (Roadmap) includes a roadmap, which contains recommendations to support implementation of the types of strategies discussed in previous sections. (Author/publisher)
Abstract