Santa Rosa police on Friday night will be holding a DUI/driver’s license checkpoint.

The checkpoint will be 7 p.m. Friday to 1 a.m. Saturday and, as is usual, police declined to say where it would be.

Officers typically arrest only a couple of DUI suspects out of the hundreds of drivers stopped at such checkpoints, but local police say the checkpoints help deter people from drinking and driving. The checkpoints are highly visible with a dozen or more officers and flashing lights, and they basically scare people into being extra careful about drinking and driving.

Santa Rosa police, in their press release on Friday’s checkpoint, noted “research shows that crashes involving alcohol drop by an average of 20 percent when well-publicized checkpoints are conducted often enough.”

“Over the course of the past three years, DUI collisions have claimed two lives and resulted in 160 injury crashes, harming 194 of our friends and neighbors,” Police Sgt. Lance Badger said in a statement.

The Santa Rosa checkpoint is funded by a grant from the state Office of Traffic Safety through the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

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