State must upgrade DWI penalties

Over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, the Nassau County Police Department nabbed 87 drunken drivers –– count ’em, 87 –– during a stepped-up enforcement effort. In Suffolk County, police reported 60 arrests.

And these, we should note, were the people who got caught.

That means that over the holiday weekend, there were likely hundreds of people who were driving drunk on Long Island streets and highways, each perfectly capable of crashing his or her vehicle and killing an innocent person driving or standing in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Our sense is that there are hundreds who drive drunk on any given weekend. We need only look to a recent series of wrong-way crashes involving drunken drivers to understand how widespread — and potentially deadly –– DWI is.

Most recently, a grand jury indicted Michael Bowen of Brooklyn for vehicular manslaughter after he allegedly drove the wrong way on the Long Island Expressway in Suffolk while drunk on Nov. 15 and killed an off-duty police officer, Andres Menzies, 35, of North Babylon.

Officials have long struggled with the thorny question of how to reduce and even eliminate DWI. It seems that no matter what is tried, people continue to drive drunk.

In the late 1990s, then Nassau County Executive Thomas Gulotta tried seizing cars operated by drunken drivers. His successor, Thomas Suozzi, tried to shame inebriated drivers by making oversized photos of them available to media outlets and encouraging them to publish them.

We believe the best approach is a combination of enforcement, education and treatment. But for any approach to have a real effect, the state must enact the toughest laws possible to put every weapon in the fight against DWI into authorities’ hands.