My wife and I attended the Kansas City Repertory Theater this past Saturday evening. The traffic was especially terrible due to all the equipment which was set up in the road. Combine that with the regular traffic of Power and Light district in addition to the professional Bull riders show going on, and you have chaos. To make it tons worse, the Kansas City police were conducting a sobriety checkpoint!
Generally, before a police officer can stop a vehicle, they must be able to articulate reasonable suspicion of a crime. As a people, we are Constitutionally protected from illegal searches, pursuant to the 4th Amendment. In fact, as a criminal defense attorney, I am regularly filing motions to suppress drunk driving evidence based on illegal stops. However, police officers get around this 4th Amendment protection by conducting sobriety checkpoints. In fact, this past weekend, Kansas City arrested eight people for DWI while conducting a sobriety checkpoint from Saturday night at 11:00 p.m. to Sunday morning at 4 a.m. Additionally, law enforcement charged one person for driving while license was suspended or revoked. The checkpoint was at 13th and Pennsylvania.
The Kansas City checkpoint was conducted through a combined effort of the Kansas City, MO police department and the Jackson County Sheriff's Office. They ended up stopping 245 vehicles at the DUI checkpoint.