While fans of college basketball in North Carolina are accustomed to seeing their favorite teams in the top ten, we are a little less used to seeing our state hovering near the top of drunk driving lists. Regular readers of our North Caroling Criminal Law Blog will recall a recent post in which we wrote about Greensboro being ranked as the city with the highest rate of DUI arrests in the nation.
That news is followed with another list: this one puts North Carolina in the top ten of worst states for drunk driving.
While we are not at the very top, many readers will probably take little comfort in the fact that we rank number seven, according to recent research.
One of the factors that placed us so far up the list is our DUI arrest rate per 100,000 residents. North Carolina’s 518 is the fourth worst in the U.S., trailing only South Dakota (721), North Dakota (678) and Wyoming (676).
While that north-central region of the country is the worst DUI area, the researcher for Backgroundchecks.org says the “South is the deadliest region for drunk driving: 7 of the 12 states with the highest DUI death rates belong to the region (South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, North Carolina).”
Here’s what the overall top ten is in the survey:
- Wyoming
- South Dakota
- Montana
- North Dakota
- Mississippi
- New Mexico
- North Carolina
- South Carolina
- Alaska
- Wisconsin
The five states performing best:
- Massachusetts
- Delaware
- Illinois
- New Jersey
- Ohio
The state with the most DUI/DWI arrests comes as no surprise: California. But the fact that North Carolina has the fifth most arrests, though we rank ninth in population, is an indication of how vigorously police agencies here enforce drunk driving laws.
We have about twice as many people arrested here for DUI as are busted in Ohio, even though the Buckeye State has in excess of a million more residents.
And even though New York has nearly 10 million more residents, about 2,000 more people are arrested in North Carolina for DUI than in the Empire State.
Please contact our Greensboro office if you have been arrested for drunk driving and want to fight for your freedom and driving privileges.