By day, St. Paul police officer Jeremy Ellison is a buttoned-down narcotics investigator. By night, he’s the “Prince of the DWIs,” having earned a reputation as one of the state’s top DWI enforcers, reports the city’s Pioneer Press. Ellison works overtime on weekend nights as part of Operation NightCAP, which stands for Nighttime Concentrated Alcohol Patrol, a federally funded campaign to crack down on people driving while they are intoxicated. About 40 agencies in Minnesota are taking part this summer.
Pioneer Press reporter Mara H. Gottfried profiled Ellison after spending a shift with him. A St. Paul officer for six years, Ellison stopped car after car during a weekend shift July 22 into July 23. He looks for signs that drivers are impaired by alcohol, but also for other traffic violations. He doesn’t spend much time on the sober. If he pulls over a driver who hasn’t been drinking, he issues a warning – or sometimes a ticket if the violation is serious enough – and quickly moves on. And once Ellison has found someone who is over the legal limit to drive, which is a blood-alcohol level of 0.08 in Minnesota, he works quickly to get back on the street and find more drunken drivers. What once took Ellison 3½ hours, from arrest to filling out reports and booking at the jail, he has whittled to about one hour.