Motor vehicle crashes remain the leading cause of death for Americans under age 25, and many of these crashes involve substance use. To help reduce the volume of impaired drivers, many--but not all--states allow for sobriety checkpoints (SC). While historically checkpoint stops were used to enforce drunk driving laws, they are increasingly being used to deter and prosecute drugged drivers, especially in states where marijuana is legal.
Although “no-cause” traffic stops remain controversial, comparatively little data exist that helps inform related debates. While the SCOTUS permits such stops as a general matter, courts in eleven states have ruled that state constitutional provisions preclude sobriety checkpoints. And those states that discontinued sobriety checkpoints provide a critical source of data that a recent paper, Sobriety Checkpoint Law, Fatal Car Crashes and Arrests, exploits. In their paper, Lauren Jones (OSU—public affairs) and C. Blain Moran (OSU—public affairs) compare trends in event frequencies “across states that did and did not turn off their SC laws, net of confounding factors.” The paper finds, at bottom, that when states make sobriety checkpoints illegal, annual fatal crashes and DUI arrests increase. The paper also notes a racial effect relating to DUI and cannabis arrests. The abstract follows.
“Sobriety checkpoints have been used since the early 1980s to enforce laws prohibiting driving while intoxicated (DWI), and to deter DWI. However, their constitutionality has been questioned, as they allow police to stop drivers without cause. As a result, eleven states have banned their use. Using a two-way fixed effects event study analysis, we estimate the effect of rendering sobriety checkpoints illegal on state-level counts of fatal car crashes, and arrests for driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol (DUI), and drug possession. We find evidence that when states make sobriety checkpoints illegal, the number of annual fatal crashes increases by 17 percent. We also find evidence that rendering sobriety checkpoints illegal leads to a 25 percent increase in the number of annual DUI arrests in a state, suggesting that the deterrent effect of checkpoints is much stronger than their enforcement impacts. We also find suggestive evidence that eliminating sobriety checkpoints increases racial disparities in DUI and cannabis possession arrests, with larger impacts on arrests among Black residents.”
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