Performance measures and benchmarks are an emerging interest generally in the traffic safety field, and in relation to impaired driving specifically. The globalisation of our environment has created an increasing demand for leadership to enable the development of meaningful and standardized measures of problems, and to facilitate comparisons across jurisdictions that are local, regional, national, and international. Such measures are essential to increase understanding of the different facets of the impaired driving problem, and afford policymakers new insight into available opportunities to not only address the issue, but more importantly, to measure progress in doing so. The ability of jurisdictions to measure progress is closely connected to their success in effectively filling gaps that exist and developing evidence-based actions to reduce impaired driving. Professionals involved in each phase of the DWI system rely upon a variety of measures to determine their effectiveness in achieving their respective goals and objectives. However, these measures may not be consistent across jurisdictions, or even within a profession, depending on the management structure within a state or Tribe, and the branch of government in which the professionals are situated. To date, there is no national set of widely accepted, essential benchmarks for each of the phases of the criminal DWI system. This report from the Working Group on DWI System Improvements is designed to inform practitioners, program administrators, and policymakers about the most commonly available performance measures that currently exist at each phase of the system, their strengths and limitations, and opportunities to bolster the measurement of impaired driving progress. It was created through input from practitioners and provides context to inform decisions about performance measures, describes what measures generally exist, and identifies recommendations to improve available measures for the system as a whole. (Author/publisher)
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