A COVID-19 Public Health Silver Lining? Reductions in Driving under the Influence Arrests and Crashes in Miami-Dade County

ABSTRACT

The health crisis that began in early 2020 has generated a large amount of interest in the effect of COVID-19 on public health. The majority of this work has centered around trying to better understand how the virus spreads, where it spreads, who is at risk and when, in order to provide evidence-based guidance to the public, and stop the pandemic. The Centers for Disease Control has continued to report the largely somber findings; however, there are silver linings. The temporary reduction in daily global CO₂ emissions was one of these, but there are others. In this case study on Miami-Dade County, Fl, a regression discontinuity model is used to highlight reductions in both drunk driving crashes and driving under the influence arrests. While we observed immediate reductions in both crashes and arrests as a result of the March 2020 lockdown, more importantly over the duration of the year since the lockdown we observed a staggering reduction of over 800 fewer driving under the influence arrests and almost 150 alcohol-related motor-vehicle crashes.

Acknowledgments

The authors acknowledge the Attorney General’s Office for Miami-Dade County, Florida for providing the data utilized for the study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ In one assessment, The Economist reported that which lockdowns led to less driving, deaths on the road increased (https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/04/03/americans-are-driving-less-but-more-are-dying-in-accidents; accessed June 30, 2021).

² An anonymous reviewer raised some concern over the use of too many observations away from the discontinuity in the RDiT estimation (i.e., data points in 2016 are not really suitable in an RDiT setting where the discontinuity occurred in March 2020). This is a valid observation, had we not adopted an approach that included harmonic components, fixed effects, and a series of meteorological factors to directly control for potential confounders. Of course, no RDiT is perfect, but we do believe that given this, unless there was some policy around driving we were all unaware of, then we remain less concerned about some other effect that we have not considered. Importantly, in the only recent review/simulation study we are aware (see Hausman and Rapson 2018), the findings suggest that our approach is not only in line with others, but that global polynomial approaches, which are very much in line with our own, perform slightly better than local linear approaches that only consider for example the period immediately before and after. Also, it is important to keep in mind we binned the data into weekly counts and so it is not unduly imbalanced. We have roughly three times the number of weeks for the pre-lockdown period to after the lockdown period, which is not uncommon in this area of work (see Davis 2008).

³ Developing a true estimate of the costs of DUI (and related crashes and fatalities) is difficult given the various types of tangible and intangible costs (wage and productivity losses, health care costs, justice-related costs, motor vehicle damages, employer’s uninsured costs, etc.) are not routine available. Nevertheless, one of the most authoritative analyses on this issue indicates that alcohol-involved crashes cost an estimated $125 billion (Zaloshnja, Miller, and Blincoe 2013). Costs of traffic crash deaths from Florida are available for 2018, and this estimate amounted to $4.4 billion in total costs ($46 million in medical costs + $4.35 Billion in work loss costs) (https://www.cdc.gov/transportationsafety/pdf/statecosts/2020/CDC-Cost-of-Crash-Deaths-Fact-Sheets_Florida.pdf; accessed September 10, 2021).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alex R. Piquero

Alex R. Piquero is Professor and Chair of the Department of Sociology & Criminology and Arts & Sciences Distinguished Scholar at The University of Miami and Professor of Criminology at Monash University in Melbourne Australia. He is also editor of Justice Evaluation Journal. His research interests include criminal careers, criminological theory, crime policy, evidence-based crime prevention, and quantitative research methods. He has received several research, teaching, and service awards and is fellow of both the American Society of Criminology and the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences. He has received several research, teaching, and mentoring awards. In 2019, he received the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences Bruce Smith, Sr. Award for outstanding contributions to criminal justice and in 2020 he was recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Division of Developmental & Life-Course Criminology of the American Society of Criminology.

Justin Kurland

Justin Kurland is the Director of Research at The University of Southern Mississippi’s National Center for Spectator Sports Safety and Security.

Nicole Leeper Piquero

Nicole Leeper Piquero is Professor of Sociology & Criminology and Associate Dean in the College of Arts & Sciences at the University of Miami. She received her Ph.D. in Criminology and Criminal Justice from the University of Maryland. Her research focuses on the study of white-collar and corporate crimes, criminological theory, as well as gender and crime.

Stephen K. Talpins

Stephen K. Talpins is Chief Assistant State Attorney at Miami-Dade County (Florida) State Attorney’s Office and NIJ LEADS Scholar.