Officers from the St. Charles County Sheriff’s Department, St. Peters Police Department and O’Fallon Police Department will man a “blood only, no-refusal” DWI checkpoint sometime Saturday.

O'Fallon, Mo., officer Larry Blunt administers a field sobriety test at a checkpoint in St. Charles in April. | Elie Gardner, Post-Dispatch

Fellow reporter Joel Currier tells me police are not releasing the time of day or specific location.

A “blood only, no-refusal” checkpoint means:

• A driver suspected of drinking will be asked to perform field sobriety tests.
• Drivers who fail the field sobriety tests will be asked to provide blood samples to test their blood-alcohol level. The legal limit in Missouri is 0.08 percent.
• Drivers who refuse to submit to the blood tests will have their licenses suspended immediately, and officers will seek warrants to draw blood.

Officers also will look for other violations during the checkpoint. Typically, the checkpoints are paid for through state grant money. A deputy estimated that a recent checkpoint cost $1,000 to $2,000.

Checkpoints and stepped up traffic enforcement have received a lot of attention lately, particularly when officers added the “no-refusal” tactic for the first time this year.

I spoke in May with Chris Luebbert of the Missouri Department of Transportation’s Highway Safety Division. He said MoDOT received about $6 million in federal funding this year from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. That money can be spent on police and prosecutor training, equipment and enforcement efforts and public education campaigns.

Not every enforcement effort involves a checkpoint or road block. For example, the Missouri Highway Patrol had 14 troopers monitoring traffic on  Oct. 13 near Highway 40 and Callahan Road in St. Charles County. They stopped 65 vehicles between 6 a.m. and 2 p.m. and issued 63 summonses and 44 warnings.

Of the citations, 62 were for speeding and one was for failing to wear a seat belt.

The Highway Patrol stepped up enforcement in St. Charles County again during an overnight operation on Oct. 17 and 18. That operation resulted in 48 stopped vehicles, six DWI arrests, 11 tickets for speeding, eight tickets for driver’s license violations and five seat belt violations.

The most recent checkpoint in St. Charles County netted six arrests out of 2,020 vehicles stopped.

Both types of increased traffic enforcement have drawn critics and supporters. Some say extra patrols are more effective and don’t force drivers who are obeying traffic laws to stop. Some say the checkpoints deter drunken drivers from getting behind the wheel.

Fatalities on Missouri roads dropped below 1,000 last year, but state officials have said they want the number to drop even lower. As of Oct. 19, 679 people had died in crashes, a 10.3 percent drop compared to the same time last year. Nationally, fatalities have dropped, too, although some experts attribute the drop to sour economic times.

So, here are a couple of polls — not scientific, of course — to see how our readers feel about the different types of enforcement efforts. Do you support both methods? Dislike both? Prefer one over the other? Vote, and let us know in the comments.

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