When Jennifer Frank took over as chief of the city of Milton’s police force in April, she brought along with her a determination to help the community she now serves.
That includes combating the ever-present DUI problem around Florida.
“The department as a whole, we’ve been looking at how we can best serve the community,” Frank told the News Journal. “To do that, we have to get statistics and data and figure out where are our gaps — what are we doing well, and what are our areas of improvement.”
Frank cited the most recent traffic data available from 2023 she was given, saying 3,561 people had died in in traffic crashes within Florida, the second-highest annual total in a decade. Of those, she said, roughly one of every three fatal crash is substance related, either alcohol or drugs.
Many in the community have voiced concern over impaired driving in the city, especially after the most recent incident involving an allegedly drunk driver who almost hit a mother and her child before crashing into a nearby home.
After the crash, the woman fled the area in her car before officers were able to stop her. Responding officers performed a field sobriety test at which point they say her blood alcohol concentration was over 2.5 times the legal limit.
Incidents like this coupled with the statewide data is why Frank said they began a department-wide enhanced DUI enforcement campaign where officers volunteer to take on additional enforcement shifts specifically geared toward removing impaired drivers off the roadway. These officers are deployed during the overnight hours Thursday through Saturday.
Although she has her officers scanning the roadways for those who may be under the influence, publicly informing locals of the stepped-up enforcement is a form of what Frank calls proactive enforcement.
Proactively attempting to keep people who are impaired from driving rather than stopping them once they’ve begun driving is paramount for MPD, according to Frank, since the department’s 5-square-mile jurisdiction doesn’t provide a lot of time for a citizen to contact police and pull the person over before they’ve left the city limit.
“By the time the officer gets there, that person could already be out of the city and over to county,” Frank said. “We then have to call county and say, ‘Hey, we received this information,’ and they have to find someone to respond out.
“We’ve realized that reactive policing when it comes to DUIs just doesn’t work,” she added. “Unfortunately, the only reactive policing that seems to work in those cases are when we’re responding to crashes when the DUI is discontinued and there’s no longer a threat to safety.”
Since Frank began staffing officers during this initiative in October, Milton’s public information officer Bethany Anderson heard of at least one community member who heard about the department’s increased enforcement and had to change their driving habits.
“He said, ‘I’m going to have to think of how I’m going to drive myself home,'” Anderson said.
While both Anderson and Frank thought it was an amusing incident, Frank said that’s essentially what she wants — people to think twice before driving under the influence of either drugs or alcohol.
“We want folks to go, ‘Hey, if there’s a potential I could be held accountable for this, I might have to think twice about whether or not I’m going to get in the car,” Frank said. “That think twice could save a life.”
This article originally appeared on Pensacola News Journal: Milton police want to prevent Florida DUI crashes
