Two roadblocks over the span of about eight hours led to officers making about two dozen arrests in Hiram. Those arrests were the culmination of the Hiram Police Department’s partnership with its Western Regional Traffic Enforcement Network sister organizations to establish sobriety checkpoints, safety belt and child passenger safety seat checks this past Friday night.

“It was very productive,” Hiram Police Chief Gary Yandura said Tuesday afternoon. “I think we actually made physical arrests on 24 people, everything ranging from DUIs to drug possession and things like that, and I believe over 50 citations were also written.

“[This] just shows that I think all the police departments cooperated with one another,” he added, “and we’re just trying to do our job, which is keep everyone else safe out there.”

Authorities set up two roadblocks—one at Highway 278 at the Cobb-Paulding line, the other at Highway 92 at Hiram Sudie Road—with Yandura saying that nine of the 24 arrests occurred at the latter roadblock in about the first two hours of the eight-hour crackdown, which began about 8 p.m. Friday and ran until 4 a.m. Saturday.

You can see a video feature on authorities' safety checks, courtesy Angela Wingers of Wingers Media, attached to this article.

Yandura says that while his department advertised last week’s roadblocks, authorities also perform road checks without giving the public advance warning.

“We always try to advertise that we’re going to be doing safety checks and road checks, it’s one of the legal requirements. However, there’s a big push by the Governor’s Office of Highway Safety now … over the weekend, Atlanta Police Department along with the Georgia State Patrol was doing what they call ‘Rolling Thunder,’” Yandura said. “Ours was a small part of that, and the Governor’s Office of Highway Safety now is starting up a ‘Click It or Ticket’ campaign, and we’ll be doing the same thing.

“There are some nights where we do spot checks, especially around the areas where we have high accidents. We like choosing areas where we have a high accident rate to eliminate hopefully the accidents and injuries, and we’ve had three fatalities in the past six months. What they’re actually pushing now, the Governor’s Office of Highway Safety and Atlanta Police Department, they actually went into areas where they have a high crime rate, and it’s a nationally proven statistic that traffic stops actually clear up a lot of the crime.”