As of early last year, drunk driving in Las Vegas was apparently on the wane … but it was something of a chicken-and-egg proposition. Las Vegas Metro was making fewer arrests, but it had also cut back its DUI enforcement, so who knows how many offenders were slipping through the cracks?
"DUI is still in the same position on the priority list that it’s always been. It’s just that if you have fewer people addressing it, you’re going to have fewer arrests," Clark County Sheriff Joe Lombardo told the Las Vegas Sun.
In 2012, the number of traffic stops topped 7,700. That fell to 5,800 in 2013 and approximately 4,692 in 2014. DUI stops then held steady in 2015, at 4,575, and as of Sept. 21 this year, 3,123, putting Metro on a pace for 4,165 DUI pullovers.
However, the Nevada Highway Patrol reported an inverse phenomenon. Its DUI stops ascended from 1,834 in 2012 to 2,265 in 2014. One reason that accounts for this disparity was that, while Metro was allocating its resources elsewhere, the NHP was keeping a steady number of troopers on the beat.
Last year, though, the NHP made only 1,092 DUI arrests, less than half the total of the year before. This year so far, it has made 803, on a pace to hit 1,070, down a fraction from 2015. So, the DUI problem seems to have leveled off, and might even be on the wane.
Perhaps ride-sharing services have contributed to this stabilization, but there’s no way to know, this early in that game, for sure.
