Cinco de Mayo Celebrations Result In 187 Arrests Across Trio of Counties

Editor's note: This information was provided by Pierce County.

Last weekend's Cinco de Mayo celebrations ended in 187 DUI arrests in King, Snohomish and Pierce Counties, where police stepped up special Target Zero patrols Friday and Saturday nights.

More than 70 officers, deputies and troopers from 33 law-enforcement agencies focused solely on areas where a high number of impaired fatalities and serious injuries have occurred in recent years. The areas targeted streets in Tacoma, Seattle, Bellevue, Federal Way, Kent, Auburn, Renton, Lynnwood, Marysville and Everett, where officers intercepted a driver going the wrong way on Highway 99. The driver was taken to the hospital, where he was assessed for alcohol poisoning and a heart syndrome caused by excessive alcohol consumption.

The holiday, which fell on a weekend for the first time in five years, included visits to bars by two mothers of victims of impaired driving crashes, police and the Washington State Liquor Control Board. The team passed out Clickit 2 Ride cards which, when scanned with a cellphone, put callers directly in contact with local taxi companies.

The mothers of the victims accompanied police to some bars to praise noteworthy efforts to ensure public safety, including a new bar owner in Tacoma who paid his servers $20 every time they identified, cut off and called a taxi for a patron who appeared to be inebriated.

Gloria Cipriano, whose 19-year-old son, Martin, was killed in February 2010 in a car crash caused by a woman who had been drinking, said, "Cinco de Mayo is about celebrating Mexican heritage, not alcohol."

The special holiday enforcement was supported by traffic safety task forces and local, county and state law-enforcement agencies in all three counties, as well as the Washington Traffic Safety Commission and leaders from the King County Latino community.