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Last updated 6:38 am CT February 09, 2010.
Local Police Step Up Patrols Near Labor Day Weekend
Officers with the Williamson County Sheriffs department conducted roadside safety checks until 3 in the morning.
Stopping hundreds of cars to make sure that drivers and passengers made it home safe.
"We're doing this to try to reduce the number of fatalities or personal injury accidents which occur in Williamson County and the surrounding counties because a lot of times you know traffic's going through our county going to somewhere else."
Lieutenant Bob McCurdy says the process is pretty simple...
Police just ask for ID and proof of insurance...and then the driver is on their way.
But not everyone complies, either turning before the checkpoint or making a u-turn.
McCurdy says that studies show that fatal accidents are mostly likely to happen between the hours of 12 AM and 3 AM.
So although the safety checks may be a bit of an inconvenience for drivers...it could ultimately keep them alive.
"By us being out there, I think we've saved someone's life by either they saw us, they knew we were out there, and they got a designated driver or they buckled up."
That's not always the case, and some drivers end up behind bars. McCurdy says he doesn't enjoy that part of the job, but it has to be done to keep others safe.
"We don't have a goal of the number of people we want to arrest, we don't have a goal about the number of tickets we want to write, we don't want to write tickets, we want to be a deterrent to keep impaired drivers off the road."
By the end of the night, authorities arrested 10 people, three of them for driving under the influence.
By Andy Waterman
awaterman@wsiltv.com
Now: 1265719814
