POUGHKEEPSIE – The City and Town of Poughkeepsie Police departments became the first to participate in a three-county initiative, Tuesday, to train officers on how to identify and arrest individuals who are violating DWI interlock ignition system orders.
The training is part of a pilot program, funded through the Governor’s Traffic Safety Committee, to train police officers, probation officers, DMV workers and employees responsible for the monitoring of DWI ignition interlock devices in automobiles, on how to identify and deal with individuals who should have an interlock device installed in their vehicle but do not.
The grant allotted $100,000, $30,000 of which will go to Dutchess County to incentivize arrests of those individuals between Memorial Day and Labor Day.
Since 2010, if any individual is convicted of DWI, they are required by law to have an interlock device installed in their vehicle. Those individuals may sign an affidavit stating that they either have no vehicle to drive or promise the court not to drive after signing the affidavit. This practice has led to the problem of individuals driving vehicles without interlocks when they are required to have them, said Executive Deputy Commissioner of the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services Michael Green.
“Now a sizable group of people are telling the judges, ‘I’m not going to drive. I don’t have a car, there’s no car for me to get one; so then, I won’t be driving’,” said Green. Some of those people are then turning around and driving anyhow. Whether it’s a car that’s really theirs but, they’re registering it in someone else’s name; it doesn’t matter. If they go and rent a car, if they borrow a car, they are not allowed to drive, under any circumstance, if they have one of those orders unless there’s an ignition interlock in the car,” he said.
Analyzed data from the New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services show that since 2010 approximately 2,500 people in Dutchess County were ordered to have an ignition interlock device installed, but only about 780 of them had them installed.
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