New Year’s Eve partiers kept police busy, with the state patrol reporting more arrests for driving under the influence of alcohol than expected.
Twenty-nine people were arrested by the state patrol in District 7, which stretches from the Snohomish County-King County line north to Canada along the I-5 corridor.
"There’s not one person out there who hasn’t heard ‘don’t drink and drive on New Year’s Eve,’ " said Trooper Lance Ramsay, a spokesman for the state patrol. "The one good thing I can say is we did not have any DUI fatalities, which is huge."
Still, he said arresting 29 people is too high a number: "We can tell people not to drink and drive until we’re blue in the face, but people just go ahead and do it anyway."
He said his district has had a team of 15 troopers out since before Thanksgiving focusing solely on arresting drunk drivers, something that will continue until at least mid-January.
He said the program has been successful, as the number of arrests in November shot up to 478, well above the district’s monthly average of about 250.
Other jurisdictions in Snohomish County also participated in the New Year’s Eve DUI crackdown, but arrest numbers were not available on Thursday.
"We made a tremendous amount of stops and contacts with the public," said Chris Andersen, a lieutenant with the Everett Police Department. "We had several DUIs and warrant (related arrests), but overall it was fairly uneventful for us."
Reporter Lukas Velush: 425-339-3449 or lvelush@heraldnet.com.
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