President's Message


Tony DeNovellis
President and CEO

Getting repeat offenders off our roads

I have a favor to ask of you. It's simple—just use your imagination for a minute or two.

Think of a Colorado map with a bright red line for I-25. This Front Range interstate covers roughly 280 miles from the New Mexico border to the Wyoming line. Let's take a quick drive along that road.

As your trip starts a bit south of Trinidad, you notice a person standing just off the pavement at Mile Marker 1, another a half mile up the road, and yet another at the next mile marker. These roadside sentinels continue to appear every 880 yards as you drive north—a person near the bridge that spans the Arkansas River in Pueblo, another in the shadow of Pikes Peak in Colorado Springs, one standing on an overpass near Invesco Field. They continue north, past Johnson's Corner, Wellington, Buckeye Road, then beyond as I-25 gently gains elevation to the state line. If you drove 60 mph for this entire trip, you would have passed a person on the shoulder of the road every 30 seconds. Now it's time to make the move from imagination to reality.

Those people represent the 554 children, teens and adults killed annually in alcohol-related crashes on Colorado highways. Everyone at AAA Colorado believes these just-released numbers (based on 2007 statistics) are much too high.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 32% of U.S. traffic fatalities in 2007 involved an alcohol-impaired driver. Across the nation that year, 12,998 people lost their lives from alcohol-impaired driving. About one-third of those arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol were repeat offenders.

To tackle this problem, AAA Colorado is supporting a national AAA website (www.AAADUIJusticeLink.com) that will pull together information about common problems faced by the justice community in detecting an alcohol-impaired driver and moving that person through the legal system, and potential solutions to those problems. DUI JusticeLink is a valuable resource for the entire criminal justice community as its members can easily access impartial information about a wide range of impaired driving issues.

Think of the site as a "Wikipedia" for judges, prosecutors, law enforcement. It will compile DUI-related resources, such as state laws, up-to-date statistics and academic research reports.

Armed with a better understanding of the existing problems, criminal justice professionals can work together to reduce alcohol-impaired driving—and get repeat offenders off America's roadways.

And imagine how much safer that will make all of us feel.