Good morning ... Gotcha!
Police A.M. sobriety checkpoint a big success
By Cindy Yurth
Tséyi' Bureau
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(Times photo - Donovan Quintero)
A Navajo police officer places a man under arrest for drunken driving, after he failed a field sobriety test last Friday during a DWI checkpoint on State Highway 264 east of Tse Bonito, N.M.
A sobriety checkpoint set up Friday between Gallup and this small community on the edge of the Navajo Nation was one of the most successful ever, according to Navajo Nation Police Lt. Henry Moore, Window Rock District operations commander.
By about 11 a.m., officers stopping vehicles at the checkpoint had confiscated eight 30-packs and five cases of beer along with seven bottles of hard liquor on its way into the Navajo Nation, where it is illegal.
"Quite a few" drunk-driving arrests had also been made in spite of the early hour, and warnings were issued to people who were driving children without child seats in the car.
Moore said Wednesday that police did not total the amount of liquor confiscated, but issued 30 citations including four arrests for driving under the influence, one for delivery of alcohol and six for public intoxication.
Most of the non-alcohol related citations were for driving without a valid license, he said.
The lieutenant said it was the first time officers had set up a checkpoint so early, at about 9 a.m., and he felt that did the trick.
"We had been doing it usually between dusk and midnight," he said. "We were getting a little too predictable."
The eight 30-packs were in a single vehicle, obviously intended for bootlegging, Moore said. He said he was thinking of invoking a seldom-enforced New Mexico law that prohibits retailers from selling more than five gallons of liquor to a single individual.
"It think it's time to start going after the retailers," he said. "They know what they're doing."
Moore called the checkpoint "kind of fun" and said he had met a few people he hadn't seen in years.
On the downside, he would rather have not run into some of those people.
"They just arrested a relative of mine over there," he said, pointing to where officers were having suspicious vehicles pull over for inspection. "I couldn't do anything for him. If we start giving people special treatment, it undermines everything we are trying to do. I just walked away and let the officers do their job."
Other folks, however, looked wide-eyed out their car windows at the huge pile of confiscated cans and bottles, and thanked the officers for keeping all that booze off the rez.
"I think, in general, people are appreciative of this," Moore said. "They know what alcohol is doing to our people."