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See How We’re Putting Our Mission Into Action
Driven by the death of eight University of Wyoming student athletes because of a drunk driver, the Council on Impaired Driving was created in 2011 to:
- Lead Wyoming’s efforts to reduce drug- and alcohol-involved crashes through research, discussion and planning.
- Identify priority issues and effective prevention strategies related to impaired driving.
- Develop plans for implementing those strategies.
Those responsibilities have led to several council initiatives, including:
Enhanced DUI Enforcement
Another early initiative started by reviewing alcohol-involved crash data, which uncovered the need for more strategic DUI enforcement. We provided additional funding and strategic support to seven counties with high crash rates to increase enforcement. Today, the funding, support and strategies continue to adapt based on new crash data.
- All states have statutes that can “enhance” or increase the mandatory minimum punishment for a DUI-DWI offense based upon either: (a) your extremely high blood alcohol level at the time of your arrest; (b) due to your alleged prior DUI-DWI convictions; or (c) [in a few states] for refusing to submit to the State’s chemical test of your blood, breath or urine.
- There are two main types of Enhanced DUI Enforcement Events:
- DUI/Sobriety Checkpoints: when cars are stopped at a particular point along a roadway exclusively for checking drivers operating vehicles under the influence of alcohol and/or drugs.
- Wyoming laws prohibit the use of DUI checkpoints to identify impaired driving on the state’s roadways.
- DUI/Sobriety Saturation Patrols: when special enforcement activities are conducted by officers as part of a publicly announced high visibility DUI enforcement period.
- DUI/Sobriety Checkpoints: when cars are stopped at a particular point along a roadway exclusively for checking drivers operating vehicles under the influence of alcohol and/or drugs.
Local Media
We’ve worked with advertising agencies to create videos, billboards and more aimed at reducing impaired driving in Wyoming.
Project Evaluation
Possibly our most important initiative is the evaluation of our other initiatives. We asked the Wyoming Survey & Analysis Center (WYSAC) at the University of Wyoming to help us answer three questions about each: What was done? How much was done? And are the people of Wyoming better off because of it?
You can download the Evaluation Report for our initiatives here.