Grant to bolster police force

A $664,128 state grant will allow Huntington Beach police to dedicate two full-time officers to enforcing drunk-driving laws just in time for this weekend’s New Year’s revelry.

The California Office of Traffic Safety grant will help pay for quarterly checkpoints, beginning Sunday.

The DUI Enforcement Team will most likely focus its patrols on weekends and late-night hours. The department also used the money to acquire two new Honda 1300 motorcycles for the DUI Enforcement Team.

Sgt. Steve Bushhousen of the department’s traffic bureau wrote the grant. It was much like the grant proposal for the same program he supervised during the past two years, but there were key differences.

“I had the idea to do it a little different than just offering overtime [to other officers],” Bushhousen said. “This makes it more of a dedicated team, kind of experts…. Literally hundreds of officers signed up for overtime under the old grant.”

Officers Tim Pappas and Tai Huynh, who head up the enforcement team, both have well over 10 years of experience in traffic enforcement. They will receive specific training to enforce DUI laws, but there won’t be a steep learning curve since they are both veterans, Bushhousen said.

“Both are currently traffic officers, so they already have hundreds of arrests,” Bushhousen said.

In addition to their regular duties as patrol officers, Huynh and Pappas will take charge of serving arrest warrants to DUI offenders who have failed to appear in court.

The numbers of DUI arrests in Huntington have gone up by almost 200 each year since 2004.

As of Wednesday, police made 1,383 DUI-related arrests this year. Bushhousen attributed it to the department’s “aggressive posture on DUI enforcement,” not necessarily to a rise in new drunk drivers.

“I don’t think there is any city that can say [more people are driving under the influence] just because of [more] arrests,” he said.

But one thing people can say by looking at the figures is that the number of people killed in DUI-related traffic accidents in the city is on the rise.

In 2002, more than half of the 12 fatal traffic accidents in Huntington were DUI-related. The numbers have not been that high since, but they have steadily risen each year, with one DUI-related fatality in 2003, two in 2004, three in 2005 and, as of Wednesday, four deaths in 2006.

As the new year comes around, Bushhousen’s main goal for the program is prevention.

If people know that there is a team out there focused on specifically enforcing DUI laws, hopefully the risk of apprehension will deter drivers from taking the risk, Bushhousen said.

“We’ll be around for the next two years,” he said.