Holiday DWI focus

Every year in December, the Lincoln Police Department puts a special focus on drunk driving enforcement. Since the vast majority of drunk driving arrests occur on the late shift, Capt. Marty Fehringer, one of the overnight Duty Commanders, was this year's coordinator, and sent me the results: 213 DWI arrests by LPD during the month of December.  This is the all-time single month record for drunk driving arrests in Lincoln. As I have often said, there is nothing that a police officer does that has a greater impact on public safety than arresting a drunk driver.  The officers who contributed to this project should be complimented for their efforts.

We weren't alone in focusing on DWI during the month, and the local news has reported on the results from the Lancaster County Sheriff's Office, and the statewide arrests by the Nebraska State Patrol.

Here's an interesting way of looking at LPD's drunk driving arrests: a temporal grid of the past few years, cases.  I've blogged before about using this method for visualizing data sets that have strong time-and-day patterns, which is clearly evident in the DWI arrests. You can click on the image to enlarge the view.

This grid, by the way, is a screen capture from our latest version of CrimeView Dashboard.  It took me less than five minutes to prepare this for my blog this morning. Performing this analysis and producing a graphic like this a few years ago would have made a decent project for the week.  It also would have required a few thousand dollars worth of software on a fat honking PC, and a GIS analyst with extensive training and experience.  Now it's a few minutes on my wife's low-end Dell with an iffy WiFi connection in our little home office, while sipping my first cup of joe. Pretty incredible, when you think about it.