As New Year’s Eve approaches, enticement to revelry increases. The future’s uncertain, the past is gone. Party hats and sequins. The countdown to midnight. Then, in the space of a heartbeat, the year turns over. Champagne lips blow dumb ducky horns. Confetti poppers explode, and pots and pans get banged.
In bars across Ulster County, when the music is done and the house lights have come back up, revelers in every condition will head for the door. Of those that drive themselves home along the roads and highways, local police officers, sheriff’s deputies and state troopers will have their pick.
“Right now, we’re in the high visibility for the holiday season,” said Valerie Naccarato, director of the probation department and Ulster County STOP DWI program coordinator. “The other high-visibility times are for the Super Bowl, for St. Patrick’s Day, for April 20th — I believe because that’s the marijuana day — and for Memorial Day. And we do the 100 Days of Summer, which covers a lot of the weekends throughout the summer. And then Labor Day, Halloween, and Thanksgiving, and then back around to the holidays.”
The highest number of DWI and DWAI arrests are reported in January of each year — right around 300 arrests — followed by arrests made over the months of July, October, November and April.
Funded by the fines levied on drivers pulled over and arrested for resembling New York State’s definition of intoxication, the program whose goal is to reduce the numbers of drivers out on the road with booze in their system, was rolled out in 1982, a year when 19-year-olds could still legally drink alcohol and the blood alcohol concentration (BAC) limit one had to stay under and still be able to drive was one percent, down from the previous decade’s one and a half percent.
Since those heady times, proponents of temperance behind the wheel have been advocating for ever more stringent laws.
With MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) national president Millie Webb looking on in October 2000, president Bill Clinton signed a historically low eight-tenths of one percent impaired-driving standard into law nationally.
A press clipping commemorating the occasion reports that in the year 1999 alone 15,786 Americans had been killed in alcohol-related crashes. By 2022, that number had dropped to 13,524 after an entirely new standard of unsobriety, known as driving while ability-impaired (DWAI), had been created and outlawed. For the first time, a driver showing a blood-alcohol content of between .05% and .07% could be arrested, have his or her car impounded, and get hit with the same financial and life consequences as someone much further along into their cups.
Please have a plan
“In order to drive down the numbers, the STOP DWI program favors the General Deterrence Model, a strategy intended “to get people not to do something.” Prevention education, incapacitation, reform and deterrence, are one point each on a four-pronged plan.
“This program started in 1981,” said Deborah Stitt, administrator of the STOP DWI in Ulster County, “and that was the model. That’s how it’s always been. In essence, our job is to work ourselves out of a job.”
The program’s mission is not to tell people not to drink,” said Stitt. “We’re not telling you not to go out and have a good time. We just want you to have a plan …. If you go out, how are you going to get home at the end of the night?”
Operated by cooperating law-enforcement agencies across the county, sobriety checkpoints abound. Over the last year, sobriety checkpoints popped up along Route 9W in Port Ewen and in Marlborough, on East Chester and Miron in Kingston, Barclay and Burt streets in Saugerties, Route 32 at Mower Mill Road, and at least twice on the Rhinecliff Bridge.
Officers will be out on the roads of Ulster County in force in the early-morning hours of January 1, looking for reasons to pull drivers over.
“I would like people to use rideshares,” said Stitt. “I could see people complaining that there was no way to get around ten years ago, but Uber and Lyft are in the area now. Obviously, it’s a cost. But if you have the money to go out drinking, you could set aside some money to get home safe.”
Costs and results
The costs of staffing and the provision of related resources are underwritten with funds allocated by the STOP DWI program.
“Working independently, we have at least 14 different police agencies within Ulster County,” said Naccarato. “Every May they pitch to us how they’ve been doing and then ask for money. Based on what our budget is from the fine collections, we have to project into the following year how much we might have to spend and then give each of the agencies as close to what they request as possible.”
“Not all of them request money from us,” added Stitt. “So there are a few agencies in the county that do not participate in the allocation fund.” Some of the townships don’t feel that they have enough manpower to do this work.
To carry out high-visibility engagement campaigns, the program also receives money through the Governor’s Traffic Safety Committee (GTSC) for implementation of the prevention and deterrence aspects of their strategy. GTSC handed out $201,870 to an assortment of Ulster County recipients in 2024.
The police forces of New Paltz ($2100), Lloyd ($2484), Marlborough ($3584), Saugerties ($5040) and the Ulster County sheriff’s office ($12,210) all received funding for “police traffic service.”
Ulster County Community College received $99.484 for its traffic and highway safety program. Child-passenger safety programs across the county also received funds.
Policing is just one of the five pillars of STOP DWI that have to be funded. The others are probation, public information and education, rehabilitation, and prosecution.
Data from the Institute for Traffic Safety Management shows that since 2009 all alcohol-related crashes in New York have decreased by nearly ten percent. Personal-injury crashes have declined nearly 16 percent. Most impressively, fatal alcohol-related crashes have fallen by nearly 30 percent.
All good news, and yet the numbers of drivers arrested for driving under the influence recently hit a high-water mark. Arrest numbers compiled by TSLED (Traffic Safety Law Enforcement and Disposition), a traffic-ticket tracking system maintained by the DMV and shared by STOP DWI reported that in 2022 the highest number of arrests – 2233 drivers — in a decade were charged either with a DWI or a DWAI.
Because the number of those arrested for driving in an impaired condition had been on the decline for the previous seven years, it has been suggested that the high number of 2022 arrests should be viewed as an anomaly. After the two years of forced inactivity caused by pandemic lockdowns and compulsory closures of businesses, a surge of individuals who had fallen out of the practice of the discipline necessary to imbibing responsibly had sallied forth back out into the world and faced the consequences.
In 2023, the combined arrests for impaired or intoxicated drivers fell back to 1941 — still higher than the years leading up to the pandemic, but headed back in the right direction.
Drug recognition
“Naccarato and Stitt agree that the rise of drivers not necessarily under the influence of alcohol but abusing street drugs and pharmaceutical-grade medications is of increased concern.
“There are way more people using marijuana and thinking there’s nothing wrong with that and driving,” said Naccarato. “There are way more people using prescription medications. And there aren’t enough officers who are trained in the detection of drugs when they stop people. So if they don’t have a positive breath sample, they just let it go. And I think that’s a bigger problem that needs to be evaluated.”
A Catch 22 in New York State law requires officers to identify the drug involved if they suspect a driver to be high before an arrest can be made. If the officer is not officially accredited to evaluate drivers and identify the specific drug a person may have ingested, this can be a complicated assessment to make. While a blood test could pinpoint the compound, a blood test is only allowed after an arrest.
Stitt said there were only five Drug Recognition Experts (DREs) in Ulster County who could be called out to the scene of a potential arrest in order to make the determination which leads to an arrest.
“They’re going to have a drug recognition expert come evaluate the driver and see if they can figure out what the person is on,” said Stitt. “But there’s only so many DREs to go around. So if somebody’s not available to come out, then the officer cannot charge that person. I believe we are one of only like four states that have to be that specific. Most other states just say they have to have probable cause to believe you’re under the influence of some sort of substance altering your ability to drive.”
Advocates working with STOP DWI New York have been trying to get this requirement changed for years, so far to no avail.
“If you’re suspected to be under the influence of alcohol, the police officer does not have to name it — well, it’s tequila, it was vodka, it was beer,” said Stitt. “They just have to say you’re under the influence of alcohol. However, if they pull someone over and suspect that the person is under the influence of drugs, they have to be able to name the category of drugs. Be it cocaine or be it fentanyl or be it heroin, there’s all sorts of synthetic drugs, and drugs are constantly changing.”
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