Brooklyn Has 2nd Most DUI Crashes In The State, Study Finds

BROOKLYN, NY — Hundreds of drug-or-alcohol-related crashes in Brooklyn last year nearly landed the borough as the state's top county for impaired-driving collisions, a new study found.

Kings County saw 405 impaired driving crashes where people were injured in 2018, the second highest of any county in New York State, according to the study by TrafficTickets.com.

The borough was only surpassed by Suffolk County, where tourists flock to popular vacation hotspots like Montauk, the Hamptons and Robert Moses Beach. Suffolk County had 470 drug-or-alcohol-related crashes with injuries that year.

Queens was not far behind both counties with 335 crashes in 2018, the study showed.

But the high crash numbers are actually an improvement from previous years statewide, the study found.

Impaired driving crashes with injuries across the state dropped from 4,861 in 2017 to 4,647 total last year and the number of drunk driving citations was the lowest its been in 10 years, though the citation number excludes the NYPD.

"Police...reported 4.4 percent fewer serious accidents in which drugs or alcohol were a factor in 2018. Only once in the past 10 years has the rate been lower," the researchers wrote. "Last year, state and local police (excluding those of the NYPD) wrote 65,125 tickets for driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol. This is five percent fewer impaired driving tickets than in 2017 and 28 percent fewer than in 2009."

The TrafficTickets study used the latest Department of Motor Vehicles data to find trends about drivers, traffic tickets and police activity across the state.

It also looked at crashes related to cell phone use, which has skyrocketed 86 percent since 2009.

The cell phone and texting tickets seems to also be on the decline, though. Researchers found that numbers for both types of citations fell in 2018 for the first time since 2009, when the act was deemed a traffic offense.

"After years of cell phone and texting tickets increasing dramatically year over year, 2018 marked the first time that the total number of both citations declined," the researchers said.

But that cell phone use still led to a fair share of crashes. There were 1,212 cell-phone related crashes in 2018, up from 650 back in 2009. The rate of injury or death in those crashes remained the same at around 50 percent, the study found.