If you live in Washington State and drink and drive, watch out!  As Washington DUI attorneys, we stay on top of the state’s law enforcement efforts to crack down on driving under the influence of intoxicants.  And, this latest enforcement effort appears to be one of the strongest ever.

New DUI saturation patrols are now clearly being put into enforcement mode.  As is often the case, renewed attention to enforcement often follows tragedy.  The horrific deaths of two Federal Way high school students on June 10th just might have been the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back.  It appears to have triggered an even more vigorous attempt at increasing Washington DUI arrests.

Beginning earlier this month, Washington State Patrol, in conjunction with 30 agencies in the Puget Sound area, began strategically deploying “Target Zero” anti-drunk driving teams in Snohomish, King, and Pierce counties.  These teams are deployed with only one primary directive.  They want to stop as many people as possible for drinking and driving.

The goal of these Washington State DUI task force teams is to eliminate drunken driving fatalities by 2030.  The state goal is to make drunk driving so prohibitively difficult to get away with that individuals will seek alternative transportation.  There is no way to fault the teams’ overall goals.  Drunk driving is killer.  There is one huge problem, however, that almost always accompanies these efforts.  A lot of innocent people will be arrested and wrongfully convicted of a crime that they did not commit.

The simple truth is that if you have had anything to drink that night and are pulled over by one of these teams, you are much more likely than not to be arrested and charged with a Washington DUI, even if you were not under the influence that night.  And, with staggering unreliability and other scientific problems of Washington State’s breath testing machines, there may be little that you can do about it except to hire an experienced Washington DUI lawyer. 

The difference between this task force, and previous attempts to dent the roughly 200+ drunk driving relating deaths every year, is their focus on statistically driven deployment strategies. Using updated aggregate highway data on arrests, injuries, deaths, accidents and other safety data, the task forces will focus on specific “hot” zones in every county.  Unlike older and more “static” deployment strategies, these zones will be updated using the addition of “lots of data”; creating a dynamic task force that is likely to appear at new locations each and every week.

The personnel selected for this task force are composed of 21 Washington State Troopers with the “best arrest” records for driving under the influence of intoxicants. In addition, over 30 local law enforcement agencies in the Puget Sound area will provide additional personnel to beef up the task force’s presence during statistically important times. Given that law enforcement estimates that the average DUI offender drives drunk 80+ times before getting caught, it is quite possible that this task force will result in a spike in DUI arrests in the Puget Sound area of Western Washington.