LETERS: DWI CHECKPOINT SHOWS A PROBLEM

To the editor:

Please let me commend the Missouri State Highway Patrol, Cape Girardeau County Sheriff's Department and the Cape Girardeau Police Department for their DWI enforcement efforts last weekend. Also let me extend thanks to the Southeast Missourian for its excellent coverage and reporting of the event.

I'm gravely concerned about the underidentification of alcohol-related crime in our area and in society in general. The headline-grabbing news includes raids and arrests of methamphetamine-manufacturing operations, massive drug sweeps to rid the streets of crack cocaine dealers and the destruction of marijuana-growing sites. These are political hot-button issues and have garnered the attention of local officials as well as state and federal legislators.

Yet behind the headlines drunken drivers continue to wreak havoc on each and every community in Southeast Missouri and surrounding states. Alcohol abuse, misuse and addiction are second in this country only to nicotine addiction in their potential to cause death and serious illness. Throughout the 1980s and also in the 1990s, more people have died as a result of drunken-driving accidents than during the entire conflict in Vietnam.

The highway patrol calls the problem in Cape Girardeau "serious and alarming." Let's do the math associated with the most recent checkpoint operation: 500 vehicles stopped in a five-hour period equals 100 vehicles an hour, 102 drivers placed through field sobriety testing on the scene equals 20 field sobriety tests per hour and 20 drivers impaired enough that police thought it proudent to test them, 33 drivers intoxicated enough to be detained and tested on the Breathalyzer with 23 testing over the legal limit of intoxication equals 4.6 drunk drivers per hour in one location, and a different drunk driver would have been driving the streets of Cape Girardeau every 13 minutes.

The numbers speak for themselves. The problem is alarming, indeed, and frightening. Local, state and perhaps federal law enforcement officials, legislators and the public should never be allowed to de-emphasize how critical a piece of DWI enforcement, arrest and prosecution is in the war on drugs and on the preservation of safe communities.

STEVE NARROW

Perryville