Team Number: 1006
School Name: SER/SFPS Career Academy
Area of Science: Behavioral Science
Project Title: Analyzing Police Prevention of DWI in New Mexico.

Problem Definition:
DWI is a major problem through out the United States and especially here in New Mexico. Not only does DWI kill but usually it is the innocent family of five that is killed instead of the party animal who just had eight shots and two beers. DWI is one of the leading causes of death in New Mexico. There were 215 DWI crash fatalities in the year 2002 alone. This project will model methods of DWI prevention in New Mexico and their effectiveness.

Our plan for solving the problem:
It is our belief that there is not enough police in the state of New Mexico who are devoted to the prevention of DWI. On top of that, the police departments do not do enough DWI checkpoints. They did checkpoints on Thanksgiving of this year, but the checkpoints were announced on the news the night before. Therefore, in this kind of situation, you would have to be pretty drunk to forget where they are and get busted. Nevertheless, does that really prevent those dangerous drivers from getting on the road and plowing into that family of five? We feel that the police in this state are doing the bare minimum that they can to prevent this. What if they were to do three checkpoints in random locations in a town from 2 am until 4 am every morning? What if there was a checkpoint on four highways throughout the state every night? We will use the StarLogo agent-based modeling program to explore such options. Our main focus is to explore the numbers of police on the streets at one time. Our intentions for this model are to find the exact number of police devoted to DWI prevention that it would take to make the streets of New Mexico as safe as possible.

Progress:
Up to this point, we have gathered most of the numbers and statistics that we will need to enter into our Starlogo model. Based on this research, we have determined the number of state alcohol-related fatalities and are almost ready to input that into the model. We are in the final stages of completing the environment for our main model. For the most part, we have finalized the conceptual model and are ready to input our research figures.

Anticipated results:
We hope to find the exact number of police devoted to DWI prevention that this state requires to raise the level of safety for motorists and pedestrians. We know that not having enough (our current status) increases the amount of DWI fatalities. We also know that there comes that point where increasing the amount of police won’t really change anything. Therefore, what we are trying to do is find that exact number that would give us the least fatalities.

REFERENCES
DWI Resource Center. (2000). New Mexico DWI Arrests in 2000. Retrieved October 4, 2004 from the World Wide Web: www.accountablegovernment.org/nmdwiarr2000.htm.

National Hardcore Drunk Driver Project. (2004). Promising Strategies, Laws, and Programs. Retrieved October 4, 2004, from the World Wide Web: http:// dwidata.org.

New Mexico Local DWI Program. (2004). Documents Page. Retrieved October 4, 2004 from the World Wide Web: http://www.nmdwi.org/docs.html#reports.

New Mexico Traffic Safety Law Center. (2004). In the law. Retrieved December 8, 2004, from the World Wide Web: http://ipl.unm.edu/traf/.

NHTSA: People Saving People. (2004). FARS (Fatal Analysis Reporting System). Retrieved October 4, 2004, from the World Wide Web: http://www.nrd.nhsta.dot.gov/departments/nrd-01/summaries/FARS_98.html.