On Friday and Saturday, Dec. 10 and 11, Almanac reporter Ken Milllstone rode along with Montgomery County Police officers assigned to the Special Operations Division, which conducts impaired driving and underage drinking enforcement. He filed this story.
Just before 5 p.m. Friday evening, the police cruisers back up waiting to turn left on Gaither Road — dozens of them. The caravan moves forward by the rhythm of the traffic light and one by one the cars turn into the Special Operations Division lot.
Roll call is at 5 p.m. for the Alcohol Enforcement Unit and the Holiday Impaired Driving Task Force. The more than 40 officers in the room will be spread throughout the county looking for impaired drivers and underage drinking parties.
The Task Force is made up of 11 members of the Montgomery County Police along with members of other agencies: the Maryland State Police, U.S. Park Police, Rockville City Police, Chevy Chase Police and so on. The team operates from Thanksgiving through January 8 every Wednesday through Saturday night. The ten alcohol enforcement officers work on impaired driving and underage drinking enforcement and deterrence all year round. The remaining officers in the room are helping out while renewing their certification to use Preliminary Breath Test (PBT) meters that test drivers’ blood alcohol level.
All of the Special Ops officers hitting the streets are in addition to the regular patrol cops.
The department wants there to be no mistaking the message: it’s had enough of drinking and driving. We’ve all had enough.
“We should be able to hit it pretty hard tonight,” said Officer Bill Morrison, who oversees the Chemical Test for Alcohol program. “Hopefully we’ll get some good numbers and some good results and hopefully we won’t have any more tragedies tonight. That’s our ultimate goal, to cut down on the amount of tragedies.”
Areas are assigned, breath test kits handed out. By 6 p.m., most of the officers have hit the street.
TWO TEENS, ONE CASE OF BEER
Deputy Mike Stultz starts the evening shooting laser in Rockville. The laser speed gun is not picked up by radar detectors.
“When you’ve got a kid that’s doing 70, 80, 100 miles an hour that doesn’t have a lot of experience driving, it’s going to happen, especially on those back roads,” he says, reflecting on the recent spate of teen driving accidents. “Not only that, even if they don’t wreck themselves from their own experience, a deer could jump out in front of them or anything. They’re going to swerve to miss and they’re going to hit a tree or something.”
Stultz writes a few tickets, but no one is drinking. It’s early. It is also misty and cool and the roads are very slick. There’s been an accident nearby, and Stultz gives up his hiding spot to rush to the scene.
And older man and two teens have crashed outside a shopping center parking lot. No one is hurt but one of the cars is badly damaged.
They play dumb, but a bystander has already told the officers that following the accident the teens moved the beer into the trunk from the interior of the car. He says there was a third teen — the driver — who took off on foot.
The officers are miffed enough by the story, and by the snide teenagers, that they let the older man off without a ticket.
There will be other accidents in the county that night, but in this one no one was hurt, and by 8:30 p.m., two teens with a case of beer are off the street for the night.
The tow truck driver sweeps up the cracked plastic debris up from the roadway.
GIVING FAIR WARNING
Officer Chet Phillips does alcohol enforcement year-round. He is quiet, jovial, calming in a way. His demeanor belies his savvy. Nothing gets by him.
He and his intern start the evening staking out a beer and wine store in Potomac. They park one lot away, and hide behind the trees separating the lot, watching the clients come and go through binoculars. Officer Rick Burge and his intern show up. It’s a popular spot.
Kids sometimes get beer here, but the early evening is quiet. Burge pulls out his cell phone and places a call.
“Can I talk to Adam please?”
Adam is not there.
“This is officer Burge from the Montgomery County Police. We received the flyer for Adam’s birthday party.” Burge goes on to say that he knows it’s an underage drinking party and tells the person on the line that he strongly recommends that Adam not have the party, then warns him that the police will be watching the house.
A parent had intercepted the party flyer for the “BYO beer, BYO drugs, safe-sex” party for Adam’s birthday, and passed it on to the police.
Burge is not throwing up a smokescreen with the call. He identifies himself clearly and is very friendly when he advises against holding the party. He means exactly what he says. He’s given Adam and his friends a chance to opt-out.
An old Chevrolet Caprice in the beer and wine lot pulls up beside three girls, seems to solicit them, and then spins its tires peeling out of the lot. Burge follows him and stops the car at Democracy Boulevard and Seven Locks Road.
The young man is combative and smells of alcohol. He refuses a sobriety test and Burge places him under arrest.
Burge will have an hour or two of paperwork to do before he can rejoin the close-knit alcohol enforcement team.
When he does, it’s outside Adam’s party.
EXACTLY AS PROMISED
Phillips and another officer have been watching the comings and goings from around the corner, their cruisers parked with the lights off. Exactly as promised.
Two girls emerge from the house and change their clothes in the middle of the street. Several knots of teenagers arrive with packages that look a lot like cases of beer.
It’s not a big party by AEU standards — relatively quiet in fact. But one can learn a lot simply by watching. The occasional flicker of light behind the curtains of an otherwise dark room suggests the use of a lighter to smoke marijuana, the police say. It’s not hard to guess what’s going on on the second floor.
The officers wait patiently for the party to build. Patience is a big part of their jobs. When Burge arrives, they move in.
They stop two cars arriving at the party, inspect them, chide them, send them on their way. The advice is clear: go and don’t come back. You’ve gotten off lucky.
The host answers the door. She is herself under 21, though she lives by herself in the house.
She systematically moves through the arguments and evasions that the police are used to, though they seem novel to the user. She plays dumb. She accuses them of harassment. She says the only alcohol in her house is kept in a locked cabinet and dramatically announces that she will force everyone in her house to leave even though they are not doing anything wrong, if that will make the officers happy. Though she steadfastly maintains that nothing illegal is taking place inside, she denies the officers the chance to find out by coming inside.
Of the fourteen people, roughly half are 18 and half 17. All but one or two blow illegal blood alcohol levels on the breath tester. Several appear to have been smoking marijuana, according to the police.
Phillips and Burge and their interns process the teens one by one, writing citations on the hood of one of the police cars. The 17-year-olds’ parents will be notified and will have to appear with the teens to determine whether drug education classes are necessary. The 18-year-olds receive civil citations, and will have to appear in court. Depending on the judge they face they may receive little more than a scolding or as much as a $500 fine.
“If your parents still have any doubt that I am a police officer,” Burge says handing Adam his citation, “show them that.”
The host, who was combative for most of the event, ends the evening in tears. She receives three civil citations and faces hundreds of dollars in fines.
‘DRIVER CONTACTS’
Officers Nick Augustine and Kevin Conroy follow a strategy of maximizing the number of “driver contacts” to increase the odds of finding a drunk Saturday. They stop cars for expired or suspended tags, missing headlights, minor traffic violations.
“Anyone can arrest a drunk that’s driving all over the road. The art is to pull enough over and to get the ones no one would notice unless you followed them for a long time,” Phillips had said the previous night.
The vast majority of sober drivers are sent on their way with nothing more than a verbal warning: be careful, be safe.
Augustine has eagle eyes and makes a large number of stops.
Conroy is driving a car with no computer and therefore can’t run license tags to check for suspensions or outstanding violations. He patrols Bethesda and Rockville, circles around a few drinking places, makes some stops.
But everyone agrees: This Saturday is surprisingly quiet. Even the radio is dead.
SPEED, INEXPERIENCE
Heading home to Special Ops around 1 a.m. the call comes in from dispatch: “PIC on Falls Road at Falls Chapel Way, response is code three.” PIC stands for personal injury collision. Code three means lights and sirens. It’s serious.
Five young people were in the red Honda Accord speeding northbound on Falls. The driver lost control and the car crossed the double yellow line, spun around and struck a tree. The car is no less than 20 feet into the woods crumpled against the tree. It faces outward toward Falls and is angled back toward the direction from which it came. Clothes are strewn across the branches. There is blood on the mangled car door.
Half a dozen fire and rescue workers are crowded around the two most seriously injured teens. They are on stretchers, with neck braces. They are bleeding from the head and neck. One of them will be transported to the hospital as a priority one — life and death.
The driver is 19 and from Potomac; he was the only one wearing his seat belt. The two most seriously injured boys are 16 and 18. Both were ejected from the car. One of them is the driver's brother.
There is no evidence of alcohol. Other factors that lead to teen accidents were evident: excessive speed, inexperience, five young men in the car, four of them not wearing seat belts.
But the experience leaves one grasping: if not 40 officers on saturation patrol, then what?
The lesson, perhaps, is that there are limits to what enforcement can do. There are limits to what education can do. In the end, the responsibility lies with the driver and his passengers.
“We’re always looking to place blame somewhere else,” officer Phillips had said.
Conroy returns his ride-along passenger to Special Ops at nearly 2 a.m. Conroy still has two hours to go on his shift.