DUI hit and run

Hopefully you never put yourself in a situation like the following scenario, but for the sake of discussion let’s consider it:

Suppose you’ve been out with friends for the evening. You’ve had a couple of drinks, and while you might be flirting with the legal limit, you feel in control of your senses for the time being. Against your better judgment, you decide to get behind the wheel.

Halfway home, you crash into another vehicle at an intersection you’ve passed a hundred times before. You don’t know where the other car came from, but you also don’t remember actually driving to this intersection before the crash happened. You panic. Perhaps you’ve been arrested for DUI before, and you don’t want the police asking questions. You decide visually that (probably) no one was hurt, so without getting out of the car—you drive off.

Los Angeles County saw an alarming increase in the number of hit-and-run crashes in 2015, the last year for which statistics are available. According to a report from the NBC4 I-Team, the California Highway Patrol reported that the county experienced more than 28,000 such crashes in 2015. The report also revealed that 50 percent of all crashes in Los Angeles County are hit-and-run. (Compare that to the national figures; the American Automobile Association says that 11 percent of all crashes nationwide are hit-and-run.)

But California is not alone in the increasing number of hit-and-runs. New York, Florida and North Carolina are among the states also reporting big jumps in the number of crashes where drivers flee the scene.

The AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety reports that hit-and-run drivers kill nearly 1,500 people annually:

Articles Tagged with DUI hit and run

DUI and Hit-and-Run in California: Making a Bad Situation Much Worse

DUI Hit-and-Runs on the Rise? Why, and What Can Be Done?