It started with a tip that checkpoints meant to nab drunken drivers were instead taking away cars, lots of them. The investigation confirmed those fears – and more.
As a report in The Bee showed on Sunday, the sobriety stops have become cash cows for California police departments and towing firms – and they’re fattening their wallets disproportionately at the expense of Latino motorists.
This hijacking of the checkpoints is an unfair, and likely illegal, corruption of what is an effective tool to keep dangerous drivers off California’s highways.
Last year at DUI checkpoints statewide, officers impounded more than 24,000 vehicles from drivers caught without a license but made only 3,200 drunken driving arrests, according to the nonpartisan Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California, Berkeley.
To recover their cars, owners paid an average of $1,805 in towing fees and police fines – a total of more than $13 million statewide. In about 70 percent of seizures, the owners didn’t bother to retrieve their vehicles, which then were sold at auction to pay the fees and fines, generating an additional $29 million. Finally, the officers running the checkpoints collected about $30 million in overtime last year.
California law allows police to impound the cars of unlicensed drivers for 30 days if they endanger public safety. But at some checkpoints witnessed by reporters, the seized vehicles appeared just fine. And while getting unlicensed – typically uninsured – motorists off the road is worthwhile, the punishment is out of whack with the crime, especially when DUI suspects typically don’t lose their cars.
There’s another problem. While the investigation didn’t find that police target Latino neighborhoods, it documented that a result of setting up checkpoints on major thoroughfares is that many Latinos are caught in the net.
In municipalities where Latinos are the largest slice of the population, police impounded an average of 34 cars at each checkpoint – three times the rate in cities with the smallest Latino populations, the investigation found. For instance, in Montebello, near East Los Angeles, police seized 62 cars for every drunken driving arrest. (The ratio in Sacramento was eight vehicles impounded for each DUI arrest.) Police don’t check the immigration status of drivers, but reporters discovered that a sizable number of those at checkpoints are illegal immigrants, who rarely challenge the seizures or get their cars back.
It’s understandable, perhaps, that cash-strapped cities and towns are intoxicated by a revenue generator, especially when federal money often pays for the operations.
But that doesn’t justify a legally problematic practice on the rise. California has doubled its use of checkpoints in the past three years.
State officials have declared this the “Year of the Checkpoint,” and have scheduled 2,500 of them, up from about 1,700 in recent years.
It apparently is up to the courts to step in and end this abuse. A case is pending before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that challenges the constitutionality of the California law, arguing that police can’t seize vehicles when the only violation is driving without a license.
The appeals court should put this cash cow out to pasture.