Jay Riggen is worried about drunken driving, but the traffic safety specialist with the Vermont State Police said it’s not the number of arrests he’s concerned about. It’s when they’re happening.
Vermont State Police report that this summer more arrests for driving under the influence are being made after crashes, rather than at routine traffic stops or because of calls reporting reckless driving.
That means authorities may be getting to DUI offenders too late to stop them from getting hurt or hurting someone else.
“These are typical July numbers we’re seeing,” Riggen said of the arrests, “but what’s not typical is that more of them are coming from crashes than non-crashes.”
Summer is usually a busy time for DUI arrests. With people out and about, drinking later into the night, and then trying to get home, Vermont posts its highest number of DUI arrests in June, July and August, according to the state police.
In 2020, because of the pandemic, DUIs were down. Fewer people were out at bars, and many had nowhere to get home from.
Now, with the loosening of pandemic restrictions, people are flocking to bars, restaurants and parties, and the DUI arrests have jumped back up.
Riggen said there are three common scenarios in which people are arrested for drunken driving.
The first is a traffic stop. Typically, police will spot erratic driving in areas that tend to be high-risk for drunken drivers, such as on the road home from a ski town or near a university.
The second scenario is an arrest through a third-party caller. That occurs when someone calls the police to report erratic driving, police check it out, and determine the driver had too much to drink.
Third — and historically the least common DUI arrest scenario in Vermont — is a crash, where people determine a driver had been over-imbibed.
But this year is different.
“Now, the gross majority of our DUI arrests are coming from crashes,” Riggen said. “We definitely want the non-crash arrests to be higher than the crash arrests because we want to be stopping drunk drivers before they crash, but what we see now is that people are crashing and then we’re getting to them.”
State police recorded 48 crash arrests this year, up from 34 in 2019; and 53 non crash arrests compared to 78 in 2019. The total number of DUI arrests were 101 this year and 112 in 2019, according to the data provided.
Riggen said that, when police make more DUI stops, fewer accidents happen. And Vermont State Police have been making fewer routine DUI stops since the pandemic arrived a year and a half ago.
When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, Riggen said state police wanted to limit their contact with the public, for the benefit of both officers and citizens.
“When the pandemic hit, we wanted to roll back exposure,” he said. “We didn’t want to spread the virus, and police often hop between different houses and towns for work, which made us pretty high-risk for spreading Covid.” So, police made far fewer proactive traffic stops than they had before.
The decline in pre-crash DUI arrests is an unintended consequence of limiting traffic stops, Riggen believes.
Police reform has been a nationwide topic since Minneapolis police murdered George Floyd in May 2020. The reckoning for racist policing practices probably has had little effect on DUI arrests in Vermont, Riggen said.
While Vermont has changed some policing policies since Floyd’s death — including chokehold restrictions, required officer interventions to stop the use of excessive force, and body cameras for officers — Riggen said the state police are still reflecting on their practices.
“There has been no tangible change, it’s been a time of great reflection, and we are really wanting to find out what the public wants and needs from its police,” Riggen said.
But, to curb drunken-driving crashes, police will have to ramp up routine traffic stops, Riggen said.
“What the public continues to need from its troopers is to be out there making pre-crash DUI detections for everybody, not just for the public at large but for the driver,” he said. “Nobody intends to get in a crash and hurt somebody else, but that’s where troopers come in — to help them avoid disaster. When the governor lifted the state of emergency (on June 15), that was when the state police returned to full operations, so I would think we’ll see a correction back to the norm soon.”
