The police will carry out a 24-hour drunk driving monitoring marathon for the second time on Friday and Saturday.
The police’s intensified surveillance of pre-Christmas traffic carried out about a month ago, caught a total of 255 suspected drunk drivers over two weekends. Of these, 94 drivers are suspected of driving while seriously intoxicated. 63 cases were drug-related.
The monitoring is carried out with the available monitoring resources of the police departments so that most of the monitoring is done in the evening and at night.
“When leaving for a pre-Christmas party, you should leave your car at home and use, for instance, public transport if you intend to celebrate with alcohol. It is also vital to remember that if you consume a lot of alcohol in the evening, you can still have alcohol in your blood the next morning, and even later on the next day,” says Chief Superintendent Heikki Kallio of the National Police Board in a statement.
Annually, approximately 18,000 people are caught driving while drunk.
In a similar monitoring marathon in 2018, the police caught 78 suspects of drunk-driving. The number of completed breathalyzer tests was 30,266, which means that on average, every 388th tested driver turned out to be a suspected drunk driver. “The number of drunk-driving cases and crimes is high during weekend nights in November and December. Alcohol-related accidents are also common at this time of the year,” Kallio says.
The monitoring begins on Friday, December 13 at 14:00 in the afternoon and ends on Saturday at 14:00.
