Do cops constantly watch for drunk drivers?

[Roger556]

I've always wondered what cops are doing in their cars when they're driving around on Friday and Saturday nights. Are they constantly looking for people under the influence (ie. watching EVERY single car they get behind to see if they touch the lines in the lane) or do they just notice people who are blatantly drunk? We used to talk about this back in college when sadly, a lot of people I knew would drive after having a little more to drink than they probably should have.

[counihan]

I don't have time to sit behind every car I see on a Friday and/or Saturday night and look for a reason to pull them over. HOWEVER, I'm obviously going to stop people that are driving like idiots in between calls.

[retdetsgt]

Our traffic guys do, but that's their job. Cops assigned to our precinct generally don't notice too much unless the driver is really bad. Precinct cops don't have time to constantly be processing DUI's on busy nights.

[kels]

dont have too.

Just do your normal patrol and they are readily apparent.
Sorta like they have a NEON sign mounted on the car.

Of course, almost hitting a police vehicle improves your
chances of going to jail.

[Legoate]

We don't have to look for them much. I've had two drunk drivers rear end me. One back up and hit me- driving his car up onto the hood of my patrol car. I've seen one run over a motorcycle backing out of a spot. I've seen them driving with traffic cones stuck under their car. I've also had numerous drunk idiots either cut me off, or run red lights at intersections I'm driving through. And the sure sign of a drunk driver is either driving without headlights at night, or driving the wrong way down one-way streets. (Did I mention the drunk that drove by me flipping me off to make sure he had my attention?)

So you see, we don't have to look for them, they seem to find us.

[phantasm]

On a Friday or Saturday night I run from job to job to job, and have no time to pull over drunks.

[SnapShawt]

We're "driving around" going from one call to another normally. However, whether very busy or fairly slow, anytime we're behind ANY car it's part of our job to look at it with a trained eye as to obeying traffic laws and possibly being drunk. I don't get in my cruiser and say, "Hey I'm gonna go find me a drunk driver." I just go to calls or do standard patrol if not too busy, and if I come across one then I deal with it.

[Citicop]

If you make traffic stops, the drunks reveal themselves in due time.

I have gotten REALLY good DWI cases out of stops for One Headlight, Speeding, Failure to Signal, etc. There are indicators that a driver can display, and when I see them, I will stop the car and check it out.

But mostly I am just running "regular" traffic enforcement and letting the numbers do the work for me. Lots of stops= more drunks, more dope, more warrants, etc.

-Citicop.

[patchcop]

And in the summer time when they don't wear too much clothes they (and me too) are looking for hawt chickees;)

[CityOfChicago]

On a Friday or Saturday night I run from job to job to job, and have no time to pull over drunks.

Bingo here. I get out of roll call and get about 10 jobs before I start the car. We ignore most of those, since they are usually 2-4 hour old music complaints, and ride on all the in progress jobs. In between, we stop gangsters and hoodlums. I try to avoid drunks.

[retdetsgt]

The safest time to drive drunk here is between about midnight and 1 a.m. The graveyard traffic guys come on at 11, hit the street about 11:15. It generally takes them all about half an hour to 45 minutes to snag a DUI and then they're all tied up until about 1. Then they hit the street again and usually all get one more. The bars in Oregon close at 2:30 and most are free to grab one then too. It's sort of like penguins trying to get past leopard seals..... Timing is everything.

If anyone assigned to a precinct starts grabbing DUI's instead of being available for calls, peer pressure will get heavy pretty fast. I've seen them "invited" to transfer by supervisors, we can't afford to have people off the street that long for traffic stuff.

[CityOfChicago]

We see that a lot here. We have the DUI chasers who do it because there is a ton of OT in DUI court. But the rest of us get f*cked on busy nights because their personal drive for OT results in yet ANOTHER car being down.

This ranks right up there with the people who dont clear from jobs when they are done with them, but rather sit on them until they get a traffic stop somewhere else. They are NEVER available for jobs because they are always down on a stop. And the stops can often be sererated by a mile or two. "Squad I'm clear from that stop at ABC, give me another at XYZ". Or they go in with an arrest and dont clear until they have another stop, not when they leave the station "Squad we're clear from that arrest, give me a stop at ABC". Meanwhile, we're humping calls.

[retdetsgt]

We don't rotate shifts here and that's why I stayed on graveyard in uniform. Swing shift was full of people that seemed to constantly get tied up and never available to take calls.

There were fewer of us on graveyard and the first few hours were generally pretty hectic until the animals finally bedded down in their lairs. There was some cohesiveness on the shift in just about all the precincts and a willingness to stay available and clear your calls ASAP.

I think a lot of it had to do with the age range on each shift. Day shift was mostly old guys with 15 years + seniority, swing shift was kiddy cops and graveyard shift was guys with 5 to 15 years. Around long enough to be realistic, but not so long as to be burned out at all.

One of the reasons I changed my mind about finishing my career as a uniform Sgt was I didn't have enough time in grade to work anything but swing shift (who needs the most supervisors). I couldn't have stood listening to all the whiny brats on that shift.:rolleyes:

[scott715us]

It will depend from agency to agency. Metro Nashville PD has a full-time DUI unit that runs from 2000 hrs to 0430 hrs (prime time) so they snag a ton. Given that there is a cool million or so citizens in Davidson Co, there's plenty that don't get caught, but their time always comes. Whether by crash, arrest, or death, it always catches up. I just hope they don't take anyone with them in the process of their stupidity. The regular patrol/traffic guys with MNPD (from monitoring their channel) rarely have the time to actively seek out DUI offenders. They normally have 10 - 15 calls pending the second they come on shift. On Fri/Sat nights, the call volume only gets worse.

I am part of a smaller agency with less call volume, so I try to make the time to find DUI offenders. Considering that my jurisdiction is limited, I can't make too big of a dent, but one DUI driver off the road is possibly one or more lives saved that evening. I am a Sgt on the afternoon shift. Because of my rank and hours, I don't get too many any more.

[1depd]

I never looked for DUI's. To me the paperwork was excessive and it was a guarantee that we'd be off the street for hours when we got one, so they had to very bad off for me to process. It took a minimum of 20 minutes to transport to the jail, 20 minutes to blow, and twenty minutes to get back to town. So at least an hour just to have the person blow and be processed into the jail. Add to that about 15-20 minutes for the traffic stop and FST's, if the subject was cooperative, and another 2.5-3 hours for the paperwork to get done. It was a lot of work just for a simple traffic misdemeanor. I thought I was just slow and would get faster when I gained more experience, but talking with the older guys who did DUI's often I took about as long as they did to process one. Unless the person was very drunk, I normally called a cab or handled it in other ways.