TUPELO, Miss. (WTVA) -- It's inevitable. Drive enough on a highway in Mississippi and you'll end up driving through a safety checkpoint.
But on one of the deadliest holidays of the year for law enforcement, how does the state's law enforcement agency keep north Mississippi highways truly safe?
"We'll keep troopers on our high-traffic areas as well as conduct safety checkpoints and saturation patrols in surrounding counties. On our busiest highways, we will be conducting line patrols to ensure the safety of the motoring public," Trooper Jason Roe said.
Roe said the most obvious deterrent is the checkpoint, where officers trust their judgment -- and the actions of others -- to determine just how much someone's had to drink.
It also helps to have additional manpower to deal with the extra traffic, too.
"We will have extra troopers working as well as working [longer] hours," Roe said.
The next question may also be the most obvious: does this work? So far in this New Year's Holiday period, troopers made 50 DUI arrests in northeast Mississippi, accounting for about 37 percent of all such arrests in the Magnolia State.
That number's also lower than Mississippi's DUI arrest total from this time last year.
Roe said it's a good sign, but still shows they have a long way to go.
"We're always striving to protect the public," Roe said. "You know our motto: courtesy, service, safety."
