Drunken drivers kept Arizona law-enforcement officers occupied over the Thanksgiving weekend, but not nearly as frequently as a year ago.

The drop may be attributed to more Arizonans obeying the state’s DUI laws, but having fewer officers on the street to enforce the laws because of budget cuts also may have played a role.

Police arrested 118 people for DUI-related offenses this year as part of the state’s annual holiday drunken-driving task force, compared with 218 drivers arrested by task-force members during the Thanksgiving weekend in 2007.

The task force arrested 11 drivers with prior DUI convictions, 20 drivers accused of extreme DUI and 12 accused of underage DUI.

But those numbers aren’t as promising as they seem at first glance. The task force had 128 fewer officers participating this year, resulting in 847 fewer stops overall and 456 fewer citations for non-DUI offenses.

Arizona Department of Public Safety officers, in a separate effort, arrested 159 drivers suspected of driving under the influence on highways around the state, a total that also falls short of the 170 motorists DPS officers picked up during the same time period in 2007.

But the declining number of DUI cases mirrors a national trend that has played out over the past two decades, which have shown steady declines in the number of drunken drivers. A combination of factors, including education campaigns, an increasing number of female drivers (males are more likely to drive drunk) and the proliferation of tougher DUI laws in states around the country are thought to be driving the downward trend.

The dwindling number of DUI arrests is still no reason to celebrate: Drunken drivers still accounted for more than 30 percent of auto fatalities, taking the lives of more than 300 on Arizona’s streets and highways in 2007.

A high number of fatalities was one reason that Arizona lawmakers enacted a DUI law that’s touted as being among the toughest in the nation.

The law, which took effect in September 2007, requires first-time offenders to have an ignition-locking device installed in their cars for a year. The device typically costs about $100 to install and $80 per month to maintain. Another aspect of the law provides a minimum 45-day jail stay for drivers convicted with a blood-alcohol level of 0.20 percent or higher.

Though it’s too early for any statistical analysis to gauge the statute’s effectiveness, Michael Hegarty, deputy director of the Governor’s Office of Highway Safety, said the laws are having a deterrent effect.

“A lot of people are saying, ‘I’m not going to drive drunk because I don’t want to have to blow into that machine every time I drive for the next 12 months,’ ” Hegarty said.

As promising as the early results are, economic factors could continue to artificially drive down the number of drunken drivers police apprehend this holiday season.

East Valley agencies didn’t participate in the DUI task force over the Thanksgiving weekend, Hegarty said, because, in the face of budget cuts, many agencies didn’t have the officers to devote to DUI enforcements.

Though the agencies are given grant money to fund holiday DUI enforcement, police departments have to fulfill obligations to patrol their communities, too, Hegarty said.

“I think it’ll probably even out but everyone’s struggling with resources, which includes financial, and a lot of it, too, is manpower,” he said. “Do they have enough officers out there to do their regular patrols and do this enforcement?”

Source: AZ Central