Margaret Liles

Chief Maher

EDC members at the May 8 meeting received a data-driven review of police checkpoints that City Council member Olga Diaz called “the most thorough presentation” on the issue that she had seen. In the presentation, EDC past president Margaret Liles challenged statistics used to support a need for checkpoints, demonstrated that drivers license checkpoints are much less effective than roving saturation patrols, and questioned whether impounding vehicles is good public policy.

In response, Escondido Police Chief Jim Maher, who attended the meeting but had not been invited to speak, offered an explanation of various aspects of the law and current policies and directly contradicted Liles’ point about the effectiveness of checkpoints. However, Maher provided no statistics to support his challenge.

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Using statistics from the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety, the California Office of Traffic Safety, Escondido Police, and the FBI, Liles challenged many of the basic assumptions used in the discussion of the checkpoint issue. View the presentation slides in PDF HERE (Caution, large file!).

Liles began by challenging an often-reported figure from the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety that approximately 20 percent of fatal accidents involve an unlicensed driver. Upon examining the date, Liles observed that “they throw all unlicensed drivers together” and do not sort out how many unlicensed drivers are undocumented immigrants. This failure to identify undocumented immigrants renders the 20 percent figure suspect. Liles offered that a more accurate figure might be 6.6 percent, which is the total of unlicensed drivers and “unknown” drivers (because they left the accident scene). Even that may not accurately represent undocumented immigrant drivers.

Liles (with help from Chamber of Citizens president Lisa Prazeau) compared data from the California Office of Traffic Safety to show that the number of criminal arrests at checkpoints are “pretty small in comparison” to the number of cars checked – less than one percent. Roving patrols, on the other hand, result in arrests 18 percent of the time. She pointed out that they cost less, too. Checkpoints cost approximately $16,000 versus just $4,000 for roving patrols, she said.

In examining data from the Escondido Police, Liles looked at how many vehicles were impounded at each checkpoint versus the number of drivers arrested for DUI. The DUI arrests numbered between none and six, while the number of vehicles impounded was never less than 25 and as high as 46. She concluded, humorously, ”they’re much more effective at getting criminal vehicles off the road than they are at getting criminal drivers off the road.” She wondered if checkpoints are the best option. “How welcoming is it for the City of Escondido to have people drive through and have them stopped at a traffic checkpoint?” she asked.

She also noted the huge costs of impounds – approximately $2,000 per vehicle if kept 30 days. State-wide, impounds cost drivers more than $64 million each year. While the California Highway Patrol has stopped impounding cars driven by unlicensed drivers, Liles reported, many localities continue to do so. “Could it be that the owners of towing companies have some influence on the local government agencies that make these decisions?” she speculated.

Finally, Liles discussed whether police resources could be allocated more effectively. She observed that FBI statistics for 2008 and 2009 showed a 22 percent increase in violent crime in Escondido, while the rate in other comparable and nearby cities declined. “I don’t want to say this is a cause and effect,” she emphasized, but I would also say that is is not a valid argument to make that because we have illegal immigrants that our fatal crash rate is higher than it would be otherwise. You can’t have it both ways.”

Maher responds

Maher began by explaining the state law regarding driver licenses and impoundments. He said the Safe Streets Act was passed by the State Legislature in the 1990s because “the legislators recognized that unlicensed drivers contributed disproportionally to traffic accidents, including fatalities.” He said the law was intended to take the vehicle off the streets until the driver could get legally licensed, “but no longer than 30 days. It was not intended to keep the car forever. It was intended to get someone to go and get their license,” he explained. He said a driver who HAS a license, but does not have it with him/her gets cited, but the car is not impounded because the driver has a valid license. Later, in response to a question, Maher also said that the state legislature specified that it did not want police to conduct random stops looking for unlicensed drivers. Thus, he said, many departments conduct checkpoints.

Maher mentioned that California’s decision not to allow illegal immigrants to hold drivers licenses is the basis for the controversy over checkpoints. He suggested that EDC and other groups should direct their efforts at trying to change the law.

DUI checkpoints, Maher explained, are run in such a way that racial profiling would be next to impossible. “We pull cars over seven-at-a-time,” he said. And because it is night time, the officer that decides which seven cars “go into the chute at best can see only the first driver, and cannot see who is in the other cars.”

Drivers license checkpoints are usually conducted during the day, but “everyone who comes through is asked to show their licenses – everyone,” said Maher. Comments that at some checkpoints drivers are often waived through can be traced to a policy aimed at preventing long delays. “I have tried since day one to make this a minimal inconvenience for folks,” Maher said, so when the line gets too long, cars are waived through.

Maher explained that Escondido has had very high rates of hit and run accidents, fatal and injury accidents and DUI accidents. “One of my priorities is to improve that,” he said. Because of these statistics, Maher said, the state has made funds available to Escondido for prevention efforts, including DUI checkpoints and saturation patrols. He said that DUI checkpoints are “totally funded” by the state, and “we are not taking resources from other activities.”

He maintained that saturation patrols “are not as efficient” as checkpoints, saying that checkpoints “screen many more cars and write many more tickets for other safety issues,” though his comments appeared to contradict the statistics Liles presented.

Maher said checkpoints are a tool under the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which deals with search and seizure, and that if he failed to use that tool “I would be derelict in my duty” to make the streets of Escondido as safe as possible.