State kicking off anti-DWI ad campaign
TV and radio messages to run through Jan. 9
Starting today though Jan. 9, the state of New Mexico will be running a series of three TV and radio ads designed to show what it’s like from the driver’s perspective to get arrested for driving while intoxicated.
The $240,000 campaign, unveiled Tuesday by Gov. Susana Martinez, is dovetailing with the release of a new top 10 list of the worst of the worst repeat DWI offenders — some of them with seven DWI arrests and “who have skipped out on probation or parole,” Martinez said. “That means they’re on the run and there is a warrant out for their arrest. They are fugitives, and our officers are coming to get you.”
The TV and radio ads, created by the New Mexico Department of Transportation, follow a driver who just left a restaurant where he consumed alcoholic beverages. A State Police officer pulls him over and tells him he was swerving on the
roadway and asks if he’d been drinking.
The driver at first claims that he only had “a couple of drinks,” but upon performing poorly on a field sobriety test he finally confesses that he had four drinks. The officer tells him, “You are under arrest for driving under the influence of intoxicating liquor.”
“He pulled out his handcuffs and I got my stomach on the hood of his car,” the driver says. “I didn’t know what my family was going to think or what my boss was going to think. They know I’m better than that. … I thought I was fine, but I was over the limit.”
After the screening of the ads at the State Police district office in Albuquerque, Martinez said, “I really think that guy was pretty lucky because he did survive and he did get a safe ride to jail.”
Martinez has made fighting DWI one of her administration’s priorities. This year, she signed legislation that increases penalties for drunken driving, making it “one of the toughest laws imposed in the region,” she said. The administration also launched a campaign to stop servers and establishments from over-serving alcohol, and a court monitoring program in which citizen observers in six counties track how DWI cases are handled by judges.
In the past year, the crackdown on repeat DWI offenders has resulted in State Police arresting 195 fugitives, 21 of whom were on the top 10 list at some point, Martinez said.
State Police Chief Pete Kassetas held up a logbook showing that in the past week and a half, State Police officers in just the Albuquerque district arrested 15 people for DWI — each of them a potential tragedy waiting to happen if not for the intervention of law enforcement.