Quoted Text

Recent high-profile arrests put spotlight on DWI
Despite progress, people still drive drunk
BY SARA FOSS Gazette Reporter

An ex-congressman. A county manager. The president of an economic development corporation. A police officer. A highway superintendent. A football coach. A town board member. A state legislator.
What do these people have in common?
They’ve all been arrested for drunken driving in the Capital Region during the past few years. And, because they’re all public figures, they’ve seen details of their arrests published in local newspapers. Last week alone saw the arrests of former Congressman John Sweeney and Saratoga Economic Development Corp. president Kenneth Green, who resigned after being charged with aggravated driving while intoxicated.
   At one time, these sorts of arrests were rare, almost unthinkable.
   Lenny Crouch, the Albany County Stop-DWI coordinator and a retired Albany police commander, remembers hearing what happened to the state trooper who arrested former Albany Mayor Erastus Corning for drunken driving: He was transferred to Malone, a remote town on the Canadian border. “I was a boy then,” Crouch said. “What was the lesson learned? The next time somebody like that comes along, don’t do it.”
   “In recent years, it’s become evident that who you are doesn’t matter,” continued Crouch, whose 20-year-old son, Brian, died in a drunken driving accident in 2001. “It doesn’t change what happens. Years ago, you wouldn’t think to arrest a senator driving with senator plates. One cop wouldn’t arrest another cop. Now we’re holding ourselves accountable. The message has gone out: You can’t sit back and allow people to do this.”
OTHER TIMES
   Denis Foley became Albany County’s first Stop-DWI coordinator in 1982. He recalled a time when police officers often let drunken drivers sleep in their cars and sometimes even drove them home. “For years it was swept under the rug, with everyone,” he said.
   But since the early 1980s, when the penalties for drinking and driving began to change, there’s been a shift in culture and attitude. Drinking and driving is far from rare, but it’s no longer accepted, and can result in the loss of a job and public embarrassment. Every county in New York now has a Stop-DWI coordinator, and a plan for combating drunken driving. Groups such as Mothers Against Drunk Driving have been sounding the alarm on drunken driving for years. High-profile arrests have helped send a message that nobody is above the law.
   “It’s fantastic,” Foley said, of the recent arrests. “It helps people realize that if it can happen to a former congressman, it can happen to them.”
   “When high-profile people are arrested it shows anyone can be caught,” said Dave Hanson, professor emeritus of sociology at the State University of New York at Potsdam. “It’s obviously important that these people are treated like anyone else.” He added, “People think their chances of being apprehended are low, and unless there’s an accident that’s true. . . . People think, ‘I can get away with it. It isn’t going to happen to me.’ If people were getting caught all the time, the rate of drunk driving would be much lower.”
FEWER DEATHS
   In 1982, slightly over half of all traffic fatalities in New York were alcohol related. That fi gure — 1,131 — has dropped dramatically, at one point falling to 451. In 2005, 524 traffic fatalities were alcohol related, about 37 percent of all traffic deaths in the state.
   But anti-drinking and driving advocates say the awareness level is still not where it should be. Binge drinking is a growing problem, particularly with underage drinkers and college students, and overall the consumption rate is up among youth. Denise Cashmere, the Stop-DWI coordinator for Schenectady County, said blood alcohol content levels are rising among people arrested for drunken driving. “It’s disturbing and perplexing that the blood alcohol content is creeping up,” she said.
   “The problem is still very serious,” said Hanson, who runs a Web site called Alcohol: Problems & Solutions, and whose area of research is alcohol and drinking. While there are fewer alcohol-related traffic deaths than in the late 1970s and early 1980s, he said, “the thing you want to avoid is looking at the drunk driving fatalities and saying that the numbers are down. It’s important to realize that each one of those fatalities represents a real human being with family and friends.”
   Hanson said there are two categories of offenders. One is the person who drinks on occasion, goes out to dinner or some other social function, exercises poor judgment and gets caught. “Punishment tends to be effective for these people,” Hanson said. Then there are the hardcore drinkers. “These people are addicted to alcohol,” he said. “They have a serious problem with alcohol, and the threat of punishment doesn’t deter them.” One thing that has worked, he said, are DWI courts, where a judge can give a repeat offender the option of entering an intensive treatment program. “This is serious stuff,” he said. “It has a high success rate.”
TWO STORIES
   Cashmere agreed. “You deter the deterrable,” she said. “They pay huge fines. They go to a victim’s impact panel. They go through a lot of education. People come in and tell me, ‘This is the worst experience I’ve had in my life.’ Stop-DWI is a wonderful program for getting first-time offenders to never do this again.” The hardcore drinkers, she said, are a different story. Some people, she said, are angry they got caught. “People get blasé,” she said. “They say, ‘They’re telling us we can’t drink. Prohibition is next.’ ”
   Cashmere, who has served as Schenectady’s County’s Stop-DWI coordinator since the position was created in 1982, said that three things had a major impact on drinking and driving in the 1980s. New laws prevented people charged with drinking and driving from pleading to a different type of charge, such as parking on a highway. This made it easier to keep track of the prevalence of drinking and driving. New fines made drinking and driving more expensive, but also funded the Stop-DWI offices. And “there was a surge of education,” Cashmere said. But in the past 10 years, “We’ve noticed arrests going up,” she said.
   From January to September, there were 451 arrests for drunken driving in Schenectady County; 95 of these people, or about 20 percent, were charged with the more serious crime of aggravated driving while intoxicated. A person is legally drunk with a blood alcohol content level of 0.08, and can be charged with aggravated DWI when the BAC level is 0.18 or more.
TARGET AGE GROUP
   People 20 to 35 years old were the most problematic age group. Cashmere said cops have started asking the people they arrest where they had their last drink. “You start to see which bars are serving intoxicated people,” she said. “A lot of young people are going to Saratoga or Albany to drink.” But as more bars have opened in Schenectady, more drunken drivers are reporting that they had their last drink in Schenectady.
   Underage drinking, Hanson said, has become increasingly unacceptable, but also more common and extreme. Sometimes, he said, his college students tell him they drive better when they’re drunk.
   College students have always gone out drinking, Cashmere said, but now more of those students are going out with the intention of getting so drunk they pass out. “Underage drinking is one thing,” she said. “In the past, underage drinkers would get someone else to drive. Now, that someone else is intoxicated.”
   “Kids know the message,” said Donna Kopec, executive director of the New York state chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, based in Latham. “They may choose to disregard it.”
   Foley, the Albany Stop-DWI coordinator, believes drunken driving is preventable. But he believes harsher penalties are needed, such as mandatory jail time for a second arrest, and stiffer penalties for underage and younger drinkers. Colleges, he said, should consider expelling repeat offenders. “If you make the penalties harder on youth, I think the laws for the general public are fine,” he said.
EFFECTIVE EXHIBITS
   Foley is developing a college curriculum for the State University of New York titled Alcohol, Drugs and the College Experience. An exhibit he developed titled “Friends: One Day, One Wrong Turn,” about a 2000 drunken driving accident that killed four Colgate University students, has traveled to 35 colleges throughout the country. He has received a grant to develop other exhibits, tailored to specific communities, that highlight drunken driving crashes that claimed the lives of youth.
   These exhibits are effective, Foley said, because students see that people just like them have died in drunken driving accidents. “Students realize they are not superman or superwoman, that life is a gift and it can end tragically,” he said.
   For the past three years, Crouch has brought a similar message to Albany police recruits, enlisting police officers who have gotten in trouble for drinking and driving to talk about their experiences. “We don’t sugarcoat it,” Crouch said. “We tell it like it is. We say, ‘You’re responsible.’ ”
   In recent years, there have been a number of alcohol-related incidents involving Albany police officers.
   In 2006, an off-duty police sergeant was arrested on charges of driving while intoxicated after his car struck another vehicle being driven by an off-duty police officer from the Rensselaer Police Department. An off-duty Albany police detective killed in a car crash in 2006 was found to have alcohol in his system, though he was not legally drunk. In 2004, Officer Greg Krikorian was arrested for DWI after his car burned down an apartment building when he attempted to back the vehicle into his Green Island garage.
   The bottom line, Crouch said, is that people should know better. “I drink,” he said. “Sometimes I go out and have more than my share. I get a ride.”
A HARD-DRINKING TOWN?
city of Albany is a hard-drinking town where drinking and driving is condoned. The anonymous blogger who runs the Web site Democracy in Albany has frequently written on the topic, and in an e-mail said, “There was one assistant district attorney who crashed his car while drunk. At least he was promptly fired by the DA. But other than that, where have our leaders been on these issues? Silent. Sends a strong message to the kids, right? We’ve just been very lucky so far that the only people who have died have been the drunk drivers themselves. Eventually an innocent victim will be killed. Sweeney was pulled over after ‘nearly striking’ a cop car. Just one more close call.”
   Crouch noted that Albany, like other cities, has a lot of bars and restaurants where people go to drink. Because it’s the state capital, fundraisers and social gatherings for politicians are common; alcohol is provided at most of these events. “We could say, ‘We’re going to have cookies and punch,’ but nobody would come,” Crouch said. “Our society has embraced the use of alcohol at social functions.” He recalled that last year there was a discussion about whether to have alcohol at the 25th anniversary celebration of the Stop-DWI association.
   But Kopec said that Albany is hardly unique.
   “Common, everyday people get arrested for drunk driving someplace every night,” Kopec said. “It only makes it into the public eye when it’s someone everyone knows. I wouldn’t say there’s an epidemic of drunk driving here. [The Capital Region] is a fairly typical representation of the rest of the state.”