State Police has DWI check point on La. 14 Friday night

There is good news and bad news when it comes to why the Louisiana State Police were in Vermilion Parish Friday night and into Saturday morning conducting a “No Refusal Check Point” on La. 14 between Abbeville and Kaplan.
First, the good news.
The State Police issued a handful of citations but no DWI arrests were made.
The State Police were there from 10 p.m. Friday to around 3 a.m. Saturday. The stopped each vehicle in both lanes.
There were a total of 285 vehicles that went through the check point.
The troopers stopped each car and asked the questions of there they were coming from and if they had been drinking. If the drive answers “yes” to the drinking question, then they made the driver pull of the road and into a parking lot to conduct a sobriety test.
In five hours, there were 11 field sobriety tests performed and none resulted in DWI arrests. The drivers, who admitted to driving and drinking, were not allowed to get behind the wheel of their car. Another driver was called to drive their vehicle.
One driver was cited for open container law. The State Police arrested someone else for possession of marijuana.
Now the bad news.
The reason the State Police was in Vermilion Parish is because since the beginning of 2015, there have been five people from Vermilion Parish killed on the streets of the parish due to vehicle accidents. Those five deaths lead the Troop I area (eight parishes). There are a total of 26 deaths caused from vehicle accidents in the Troop I area.
The State Police, by stopping drivers, wants to make sure there is not a sixth person killed in the parish.
“We are out here to target impaired drivers,” Trooper Brooks David of the State Police. “We want to try and stop the accidents that are happening in Vermilion Parish. Right now we are targeting impaired drivers in Vermilion Parish. We want to slow down the fatalities.”
David encouraged people to have a plan before they leave the house if they know they will drink .
“A designated driver means zero alcohol,” he said. “We are not saying people can not drink. We know that will take place. We are saying to have someone responsible enough to drive that vehicle to get you home safely. We want to make sure no accidents happen on the highways where people are getting killed.”