Cottleville finds itself tops in DWI convictions
Either it means the city has more drunks, or a better police force. Cottleville Police Chief/City Administrator Scott Lewis hopes it’s the latter.
The city of Cottleville was recently recognized (by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch) as being at the top in the ratio of drunken driving arrests to the number of overall traffic stops made among the region's 68 largest and busiest police departments.
Cottleville’s record of less than 10 percent arrest rate in the St. Louis County and St. Charles County regional area meant that of 1,528 stops in 2008, 122 people were arrested for drunken driving. Most were white; two were African American; and one was Hispanic, according to a report filed with Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster.
“Not everyone arrested is convicted, however,” Lewis said. “They may wind up with some type of conviction, but typically they get a lawyer and get it reduced to careless and imprudent driving.”
Lewis said he believes Cottleville’s percentage of convictions was also higher in 2008, but he didn’t have exact statistics.
Other areas in St. Charles County didn’t fare as well with DWI arrests. The St. Charles County Sheriff’s Department ranked 13th; Lake Saint Louis, 17th; O’Fallon, 18th; St. Peters, 24th; St. Charles, 29th; and Wentzville, 33rd.
An 8 percent arrest rate may not seem enough to push Cottleville to the top of the list, but Lewis says arresting drunk drivers is not as easy as it may seem. Lewis said that in Missouri, on average only one-third of all drunken driving arrests result in conviction.
“DWIs are a specialized area of enforcement. There are very few officers who are really willing to do them,” Lewis said. “When the stats for 2008 were done, we had two officers who were responsible for 85 of the 122 arrests. I’d be interested in knowing what our numbers are this year since one of the two no longer works here.”
Officer Mike Salvarude and Officer John Araujo were responsible for the majority of the arrests, Lewis said.
Lewis said arresting someone for a DWI is very time consuming and paperwork intensive.
“It’s also very difficult to work with intoxicated people,” Lewis said. “A lot of officers shy away from making DWI arrests.”
Lewis said he can’t point his finger to one specific thing that put Cottleville on top of drunken driving arrests. “It’s not because we have a lot of bars. We’re a college town, but we’re a community college town, so that doesn’t really count. I guess I never thought about what attributed it to,” Lewis said. “I think it all comes down to the officers, their training and willingness to be aggressive in enforcing DWIs.”
Lewis says it’s the personality and training of the officers that results in rock solid arrests, that result in conviction.
“One of the officers was a drug recognition expert,” he said. “A lot of times you’ll get people who have the same symptoms as a DWI, but blow into the breath tester and not register. One (officer) was trained to recognize if a person was on some type of drug. That was helpful to make a lot of those additional arrests.”
Lewis said in some cases, if someone appears intoxicated and they don’t register over the legal alcohol limit, an officer might call for a ride or get a taxi. This drug recognition trained officer would follow through and arrest them for driving under the influence of a drug.
“We had 122 arrests, and St. Charles had 500, but when you do the ratio of stops to arrests, it wasn’t as big of a percentage of ours,” Lewis said. “They have 70 patrol officers and we have eight, so I asked for those statistics a long time ago.”
Lewis said the first and foremost deterrent to successful convictions for DWI arrests is the paperwork. He said an officer can work a robbery or burglary and have far less paperwork than a DWI. With DWI arrests, there must be a criminal court proceeding, an administrative procedure that the Department of Revenue has, and the Department of Revenue needs paperwork to take action on the driver’s license to hold an administrative hearing.
“I think if the state made it less cumbersome with DWI arrests, then it would be far easier to enforce DWI arrests and get a conviction,” Lewis said.
Officers who make DWI arrests also have to be field sobriety certified to operate the breathalyzer and undergo “a whole lot of training, work and effort” that has to go into a DWI arrest—red tape that other arrests don’t involve.
“In our case, officers hired from the Eastern Missouri Academy graduate with that certification, but you have to be retrained to operate it,” Lewis said. “The license expires in a prescribed period of time, but if you haven’t conducted a certain number of tests you have to be retrained.”
So, in Cottleville, DWI stops have to involve an officer that has certification, and that, Lewis said, is a disadvantage.
