The police will carry out a 24-hour drunk driving monitoring marathon for the second time. The monitoring begins on Friday, 13 December at 2 p.m. and ends on Saturday, 14 December at 2 p.m.
The monitoring is carried out with the available monitoring resources of the police departments so that most of the monitoring is done in the evening and at night.
“When leaving for a pre-Christmas party, you should leave your car at home and use, for instance, public transport if you intend to celebrate with alcohol. It is also vital to remember that if you consume a lot of alcohol in the evening, you can still have alcohol in your blood the next morning, and even later on the next day,” says Chief Superintendent Heikki Kallio of the National Police Board.
In a similar monitoring marathon in 2018, the police caught 78 suspects of drunk-driving. The number of completed breathalyser tests was 30,266, which means that on average, every 388th tested driver turned out to be a suspected drunk driver.
Annually, approximately 18,000 people are caught driving while drunk. The police’s intensified surveillance of pre-Christmas traffic, carried out about a month ago, caught a total of 255 suspected drunk drivers over two weekends. Of these, 94 drivers are suspected of driving while seriously intoxicated. 63 cases were drug-related.
“The number of drunk-driving cases and crimes is high during weekend nights in November and December. Alcohol-related accidents are also common at this time of the year,” Kallio says.
You can follow the surveillance campaign on Twitter under the hashtag #rattisvalvontamaraton.
