Rethink checkpoints this Independence Day

Before you head off to a friend's house for a July 4th cookout this weekend, you'll need a checklist of things to bring: potato salad, a six-pack of beer, sunscreen, bug spray, and the phone number of a good bail bondsman. That last item may raise a few eyebrows, but if you drive home after having just one drink and get stopped at a random sobriety checkpoint, you could end up in handcuffs down at the county clink. It doesn't even matter if you are under the legal limit if you can't recite the alphabet backwards well enough to satisfy the officer on duty.

The odds of getting stuck blowing into a plastic tube on the side of the road are better than ever, as more and more police departments around the country are relying on random roadblocks in the battle against drunk driving. At first blush this seems to make sense: A checkpoint is a highly visible statement that the police are "doing something" about the problem, and the lure of overtime pay and government grants make them popular with law enforcement agencies. The problem, however, is that it's not unusual for an all-night checkpoint to stop 1,000 drivers and make only one or two - frequently zero - drunk driving arrests. In comparison, roving patrol cars looking out for telltale signs of drunk driving, such as weaving or running stop signs, are up to 10 times more effective than checkpoints and use the same amount of police resources. But the sad reality is that politics too often gets in the way of better policies that could save lives and save money.

It has been three decades since the activist group Mothers Against Drunk Driving began working to prevent alcohol-impaired highway fatalities. Many of the policies they advocated have been successful: fatality rates have plummeted, and driving drunk has gone from socially acceptable to downright taboo. Speeding has replaced drunk driving as the number one cause of fatalities on the highway and distracted driving is becoming an increasingly serious problem.

But while the traffic safety landscape has changed, MADD's strategy has not. Instead of taking a broad approach against the behaviors that cause the most highway deaths, MADD focuses narrowly on a zero-tolerance prohibition of even responsible driving after drinking. Thanks to MADD's aggressive lobbying, local governments

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