Drunk-driving arrests in Ann Arbor declined two-thirds between 2000 and 2010.
Last year the Ann Arbor Police Department made just 134 arrests for driving under the influence, down from 491 a decade earlier. “I’d like to believe it’s from compliance,” says AAPD chief Barnett Jones. “Mothers Against Drunk Driving has had an impact with education, and the judges have had a great impact too. People are starting to realize that you really can’t afford to get a DUI. And, since 2008, the economy’s been a big factor: a lot of people don’t have the money to go out drinking and driving any more.”
But the chief acknowledges another reason. “It’s also a case of less officers, fewer tickets, and not just here but in everybody’s community. We don’t have patrols for drunks, and we haven’t since I started here. We don’t have the officers. My priorities are crime prevention and making arrests.
“There was federal and state grant money available in the nineties to target drunk drivers [with road patrols], but that ended,” Jones explains. “Grant money has dried up; state revenue [sharing] money has dried up. People have to understand that we’re doing less with less.”
Though less enforcement may be part of the reason arrests fell so much, Jones believes that drunk driving really is less common now. But he also doesn’t expect the problem ever to go away completely. That’s because he spent part of the ’80s in Oakland County cruising for drunks–and he remembers it was much worse then. “Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights from ten at night to two to three in the morning, people were going to drive drunk, and human nature being what it is, I don’t see that changing, even if less people are doing it.”
Asked when the most drunk drivers are on Ann Arbor’s roads, the chief replies, “It could be when people are coming home from the football game on Saturday–but that would be pure speculation.”
