People arrested for drunken driving and various alcohol-related offenses made up the bulk of this Halloween weekend's visitors to the Kings County Jail.

Booking records show that at least three people were admitted for drunken driving, 11 were found to be driving with a blood-alcohol limit above .08 percent and another 13 were placed in drunk protective custody.

"These trends always tend to increase as we get closer to the holidays," Sheriff's Cmdr. Dave Putnam said. "Especially when you have a holiday and a weekend align. People throw parties and the number of people drinking and driving rises."

Multiple law enforcement agencies chose to conduct heavy saturation patrols this weekend to combat the expected rise in DUI arrests. This included the Kings County Sheriff's Office, the Hanford Police Department and the Lemoore Police Department.

To compare DUI activity by area, five people were arrested in Lemoore over the weekend, another 10 were picked up in rural county areas and on the highways and 12 were picked up in Hanford.

"For the last two years, Halloween has been a problem for us," California Highway Patrol spokesman Jerry Pierce said. "We didn't have any special details this year, but we had our guys out stopping everything that was moving. If we saw someone roll through a stop sign, if we saw a vehicle violation, we'd stop them just to make sure alcohol wasn't involved."

Pierce said more than half the collisions that occurred on Halloween night statewide last year involved alcohol.

"Thankfully, we didn't have anything major around here," he said.

Some might call this Halloween weekend a time of drunken revelry.

But it may not be time to single out the holiday.

Compared to the weekend of Oct. 17, the numbers are strikingly similar. That three-day period ended with 26 people booked into the jail on alcohol-related offenses. Among those, 14 people were driving with a blood-alcohol level of .08 or more.

Police Lt. George Hernandez said that isn't a big increase over what is normally seen at this time of year.

"The bars are not as full as they used to be," he explained. "We get a certain influx of people from the (Tachi) Palace, when they close, but things are not like they used to be when The Bastille was open. The number of calls to service at the bars has definitely gone down."

The reporter can be reached at 583-2425.

(Nov. 3, 2009)