Towns all across New Jersey are participating in a nearly month-long drunk-driving crackdown. The N.J. Department of Highway Traffic Safety has provided 130 agencies $732,400 to pay officers overtime.

The grant money covers both extra roving patrols as well as DUI checkpoints. I'm all in favor of extra patrols moving within traffic, specifically looking for the tell-tale signs of impaired driving. However, checkpoints are not nearly as effective and put a burden on innocent people while using money that could be better spent on even more patrols.

Checkpoints make money for townships because they are historically allowed to give tickets for things other than drunk driving. But they fail in their mission, often finding only one impaired driver, if any at all, for hours of trying. And the drivers who are occasionally found usually aren't nearly as drunk as the more dangerous ones, caught by patrols, whose driving skills are already failing and giving themselves away.

Case in point: in June, the Monmouth County DWI Task Force set up a checkpoint in Ocean Township at the Asbury Park traffic circle. Out of 686 vehicles, only one drunk driving arrest occurred. 99.854% of drivers stopped were perfectly sober. That's a 99.854% failure rate. Roving patrols likely would have caught more without hassling innocent drivers.

In California, a checkpoint inconvenienced 1,400 drivers, and not a single drunk driver was found.

In Ohio, 450 drivers were stopped with not one drunk driving charge.

In many studies, DWI, checkpoints are found to be ineffective.

In 2009, the University of Maryland conducted a study on the effectiveness of checkpoints, which concluded they did not have "any impact on public perceptions, driver behaviors, or alcohol-related crashes, police citations for impaired driving, and public perceptions of alcohol-impaired driving risk."

National Highway Traffic Safety Administration examined this issue as well. They found checkpoint programs in several states did not have any effect on drunk driving awareness.

Supreme Courts in Pennsylvania and New Hampshire have concluded roving patrols catch 10 times more drunk drivers than DWI checkpoints. The FBI backs this as well, stating roving patrols of police officers are shown to result in far more drunk driving arrests than checkpoints.

I don't want drunks killing themselves or others. But let's be smarter and catch more of them.