Eunice Police Lt. Ryan Young announced the department is joining the Louisiana Highway Safety Commission’s Drive Sober or Get Pulled Over campaign.
Young announced the Eunice Police are joining the enforcement effort during Tuesday’s Mayor and Board of Aldermen meeting.
Young said about 10,500 people die from alcohol-related traffic wrecks each year.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention broke that down to 30 people a day about one person every 50 minutes dying from an alcohol-related crash, he said.
“The best way to stay safe on the road is to never mix drinking and driving,” he said.
The campaign started Friday and ends Sept. 2.
“State troopers, sheriff’s deputies, and police officers in Louisiana will be on the job, keeping the roads safe for the rest of us,” LHSC Executive Director Lisa Freeman said in a news release. “If you are drinking and driving, they will see you, stop you, and arrest you.”
The Drive Sober or Get Pulled Over campaign is funded by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. During this time, law enforcement agencies receive overtime funding for additional patrols to carry out impaired driving enforcement.
“During holidays, we usually see an increase in crashes caused by drivers who are impaired by alcohol and drugs,” Freeman said. “Our goal with Drive Sober or Get Pulled Over is to identify those impaired drivers and get them off the road.”
During the 2022 Labor Day holiday, 490 people across the country were killed in crashes, according to NHTSA. Thirty-nine percent (190) of those crash fatalities involved a drunk driver, and a quarter (25%) involved drivers with a BAC almost twice the legal limit (.15+ BAC).
From 2018-2022 in Louisiana, 14 people were killed in alcohol-related crashes during the Labor Day holiday, according to data from the Center for Analytics and Research in Transportation Safety at LSU. Alcohol accounted for 46% of all fatalities during those holiday periods.
“Those 14 individuals aren’t here today because someone decided to drink and drive,” Freeman said. “Our law enforcement partners would much rather deliver an impaired driver to jail than deliver the news to someone that their loved one has died in a crash.”
