Keeping an eye on your RIDE

[attach]3922[/attach]You may think you can drive, but you can’t hide.

Toronto Police’s 11 Division has won an award recognizing its efforts to nab impaired drivers in the area.

Mothers Against Drunk Driving recognized the division’s traffic services for outstanding work in the Nov. 25–Jan. 1 campaign.

Staff Inspector Peter Lennox, who along with Traffic Services Sergeant Inkeri McCormack received the award in March, attributed their success in detecting impaired driving on local streets to strategy.

The division polices parts of High Park, Swansea and Bloor West Village.

“We won the award not because we had a lot of RIDEs, but because those RIDEs were productive,” Lennox said. “We need to be quite strategic about where they’re set up and where most of the impaired drivers appear to be.”

Some neighbourhoods policed by the division were found to be areas that impaired drivers were passing through between the site of their drinking and their final destination, Lennox said.

“So we try to focus on those areas and the areas that have been found to have been high accident locations or areas where we’ve been successful in before.”

McCormack researched prior RIDE checkpoints from the past five years to develop a strategy.

“I checked the type of results we got from the RIDEs and the ones that were the most productive or were getting the most impaired drivers,” McCormack said.“Those were the ones that we tried to set up the RIDEs at, so that way we get (impaired drivers) more of the time.”

She said 11 Division conducted 52 individual RIDE programs during the holiday season, with some impressive results coming out of them.

Out of 230 roadside tests conducted, 21 three-day suspensions were issued. Police found 12 drivers who had beyond the legal blood-alcohol limit.

“We also had a couple officers who are trained in the standardized field sobriety test and using their intelligence they made two arrests for drugs,” McCormack said.

Despite the successful campaign, Lennox said he doesn’t want to see the same results for the 2011 holiday RIDE season, or any others this year.

“We’d like to see very unproductive RIDEs because people aren’t drinking and driving,” he said.

“Do we expect more productive RIDEs? Unfortunately, yes.”

Lennox said while he’s seen improvement in that people are taking impaired driving more seriously, he’s mindful of the fact that there are still many people continuing to drive under the influence.

“We’ve seen a huge societal change and attitudinal change with respect to impaired driving in the last three decades,” Lennox said. “I can remember earlier generations joking about impaired driving and some of the jokes told I haven’t heard in years and I’m quite happy about that.”

With that in mind, Lennox says impaired driving is top of the list of priorities at the divisional level.

“Eleven Division has three main priorities throughout the year and traffic safety is one of them,” he said. “We do the most to get the impaired drivers off the street and that’s the bottom line here.”