We're still waiting to find out if the various DUI crackdowns taking place in South Carolina during the holiday seasons were or were not effective. There was actually a spike in the number of individuals that died on the roads in South Carolina during New Years as 11 people died this year as compared to 3 people that had died in 2009. However, at least in upstate South Carolina, none of those deaths this year have been reported to be DUI related.

When such stings take place, police may look for any number of factors to pull individuals over for allegedly reasonable cause. If a driver slightly swerves, the driver appears to be going too fast or too slow, or the muffler on the car is too noisy, police may use that as an excuse to pull the drive over and then look for any hints that alcohol had been consumed sometime during the evening.

It still must be asked whether pulling more people over will actually reduce the amount of drunk driving that is on the roads. Many drivers are pulled over in such stings that have had nothing to drink at all. Under such circumstances, it's not difficult to imagine a perfectly sober driver still being unable to pass specific field sobriety tests out of sheer nervousness. Yet simply being pulled over for a DUI often leads to the presumption that the driver was impaired while behind the wheel.

Nobody wants to see an increase in the amount of people killed on the roads due to drunken driving. However, we do need to make certain that police are not randomly pulling drivers over in hopes that, by the sheer number of drivers that are pulled over, they will then be able to arrest more individuals considered under the influence.

Source: WSPA.com, "Law Enforcement to Release Results from DUI Crackdown Tuesday," Jan. 2, 2012