Crime & Safety

Bloomfield Township Police Arrest Three, Issue more than 30 Citations in Crackdown

Federally funded patrols along Telegraph Road are scheduled to resume in mid-August.

Bloomfield Township police officers stopped 73 vehicles and arrested three motorists during a special enforcement initiative coordinated with other law enforcement agencies this month. 

Statistics released Tuesday by the Michigan State Police show that officers arrested two people for operating while intoxicated and one other driver with a blood-alcohol content of 0.17 or higher. Further details weren’t immediately available.

The officers worked more than 36 hours of overtime patrolling stretches of the Telegraph Road corridor from July 1-10 as part of the grant-funded July Fourth "Drunk Driving. Over the Limit. Under Arrest" crackdown. During that time, they ticketed five motorists for speeding, three for running red lights and three for child safety seat violations, a report showed. They also issued citations for 18 other traffic violations and 45 verbal warnings.

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Statewide, officers in 35 counties stopped more than 6,000 vehicles and arrested 218 drunken drivers. Forty-one of them had a blood-alcohol content of 0.17 or greater. They arrested 49 motorists for drug-related crimes, more than twice as many as last year’s Independence Day enforcement, said Lynn Sutfin, spokeswoman for the Michigan Office of Highway Safety Planning.

Preliminary reports indicate that nine people were killed in nine separate crashes during this year's holiday weekend with four of the crashes involving alcohol.

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The number of alcohol-related driving offenses continues to slide in Bloomfield Township, Police Chief Kirt Bowden said.

“Drunken driving arrests continue to go down in Bloomfield Township and Oakland County for the last two or three years, so I take that as a good sign,” he told members of the Bloomfield Township Board of Trustees at a recent meeting.

This year's crackdown included 15 recently trained Drug Recognition Expert (DRE) officers. DREs are trained to recognize signs of impairment in drivers under the influence of drugs other than, or in addition to, alcohol.

Grant-funded patrols resulted in the apprehension of 116 fugitives and 19 felony arrests. More than 160 seat belt and child seat violation tickets, 676 speeding tickets and 950 other traffic violation citations were also written.

A second "Over the Limit. Under Arrest" drunken driving crackdown begins Aug. 19 and will run through the Labor Day weekend.


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