YOUNGSTOWN — The Mahoning Valley OVI Task Force made four OVI arrests during its latest checkpoint and saturation patrol Friday night.

The checkpoint took place from 10 p.m. Friday to 2 a.m. Saturday on New Road in Austintown, just west of Raccoon Road. It involved 303 vehicles passing through the checkpoint and 14 vehicles being diverted into a special area for further investigation, a task force press release states.

Officers also participated in saturation patrols in that area and conducted 34 traffic stops.

Between the two types of enforcement, police officers and state troopers made four OVI arrests, gave one summons for driving under suspension; issued two summonses to appear in court for no operator’s license, issued three summonses for failing to have an adult restraint device such as a seat belt; gave one citation for failing to have a proper child restraint device, two citations for driving left of center and one citation for failing to have proper rear license-plate illumination.

One person was charged with felony improper handling of a firearm in a motor vehicle, the release states.

The agencies participating were Austintown, Boardman, Canfield, Goshen, Jackson, Mahoning County Sheriff’s office, Mill Creek MetroParks, Milton and Springfield.

“It is our hope that people make good decisions and choose not to engage in impaired driving,” the release states. “The Mahoning County OVI Task Force is committed to making the roadways in Mahoning County safer and will remain vigilant in enforcing the impaired driving laws throughout the county.”

The release notes that the OVI Task Force is funded by a federal grant administered through the Ohio Department of Public Safety.

Assistant Canfield police Chief Scott Weamer said three of the OVI arrests were made by officers conducting saturation patrols and one by the officers at the checkpoint.

Weamer is the coordinator of the task force.

Weamer said he decides where the checkpoints will take place by looking at crash data across the county for three years.

“Right now I am working off of data for Jan. 1, 2022, to Dec. 31, 2024, and I am confident that from that time frame the data is complete. It is accurate. If I get into 2025, it’s not going to be up to date, not completely accurate.” In about May 2026, he will advance the crash data he uses by one year, he said.

He said the task force also gets input from local law enforcement agencies. So in this case, there would have been input from the Austintown Police Department as to where it has been seeing “arrests, impairment problems,” he said.

Weamer said public awareness and education about the need for people not to drink and drive is a key reason the checkpoints are held.

He said he considers it a “win” if they do not make any OVI arrests because it suggests that the public is getting the message to be safe.

He said the reason OVI checkpoints are announced in advance is case law regarding whether sobriety checkpoints were legal under the Fourth Amendment.

A 1990 U.S. Supreme Court ruling arising from a lawsuit in Michigan has guided the way checkpoints are carried out. The ruling approved the challenged Michigan checkpoint but applied a “balancing test that focused on the gravity of the public concerns addressed by the checkpoint, the effectiveness of the checkpoint and the severity of the checkpoint’s interference with individual liberty,” according to the U.S. Department of Justice “virtual library.”

In the ruling, the court found that the checkpoint was “not sufficiently intrusive to be an unconstitutional intrusion of the liberty of the drivers stopped.”

The Fourth Amendment protects a person from “unreasonable searches and seizures of property by the government. It protects against arbitrary arrests,” the Cornell Law School Legal Information Institute states.

The 1990 decision also required agencies running checkpoints to “establish operational guidelines, limit officer discretion, establish site-selected criteria, notify the public of the sobriety checkpoint program, narrow the scope of the intrusion and establish procedures for handling (driver) avoidance maneuvers,” the DOJ guidance states.

Weamer said that is the reason he uses three-year data to select the sites where the checkpoints are held, and that the checkpoints are announced to the public through press releases in the days before one occurs.

“They don’t want the checkpoints to be arbitrary. They don’t want us hooking the (OVI task force) trailer up, driving around until we see a bar that is really busy, then setting up a checkpoint. That is not how it is supposed to work,” Weamer said.

“So that is why we do the crash data analysis. We meet, we discuss this,” he said. “I map out a rough calendar for the year. In August we are going to be in Austintown. Then the actual location is picked, maybe a month, three to four weeks ahead of time,” he said.

“We look at crash data. We look at input from the host agency. No one can say we are sneaky, or hiding or arbitrary, because we tell folks exactly where it’s at. That is just to show that we are complying with the court’s rulings and doing this the way they need to be done.”