OTS Records: Bakersfield Alcohol-Involved Crash Victims Rose 51% While Reported DUI Arrests Fell 24%

Two official measures moved in opposite directions

BAKERSFIELD, Calif. — The number of people killed or injured in Bakersfield crashes classified as alcohol-involved rose 51.1% from 2017 to 2023, while the separate number of DUI arrests reported for the city fell 24.3%, according to a What’s the Scoop With Broach analysis of California Office of Traffic Safety records.

OTS counted 225 victims killed or injured in alcohol-involved crashes in 2017 and 340 in 2023. Over the same endpoints, the agency's city page lists reported DUI arrests declining from 1,012 to 766.

The opposing trends do not prove that fewer arrests caused more casualties. Arrest totals can change with staffing, patrol priorities, travel patterns, driver behavior, reporting practices and other conditions not measured in the ranking pages.

The seven-year record

The latest Bakersfield city record located in OTS's public ranking system is 2023. Across the seven annual pages from 2017 through 2023, OTS reported 1,832 alcohol-involved crash victims and 5,872 DUI arrests.

Bakersfield's population rose 7.7% over those endpoints. Adjusted for that growth, the alcohol-involved victim rate still increased from about 58.5 to 82.0 per 100,000 residents—a 40.3% increase. The raw number of all traffic victims killed or injured rose 16.1%.

Alcohol involvement grew as a share of the casualty total

Alcohol-involved victims represented 12.6% of all Bakersfield traffic victims killed or injured in 2017. By 2023, the share was 16.4%, an increase of 3.8 percentage points.

The 2023 alcohol-involved count and population-adjusted rate were both the highest in the seven-year series reviewed. OTS ranked Bakersfield third-highest among 15 similarly sized cities on the agency's alcohol-involved casualty indicator that year.

OTS rankings use an Empirical Bayesian method and describe rank 1 as the highest, or worst, in the comparison group. The agency warns that estimates can overstate or understate a jurisdiction's relative safety performance. A ranking is a screening indicator, not a finding of fault.

Younger-driver and hit-and-run indicators also rose

OTS reported 72 victims in 2017 crashes involving a had-been-drinking driver age 21 to 34. In 2023, it reported 161—an increase of 123.6%. The under-21 driver indicator rose from seven victims to 36, and Bakersfield ranked highest among its 15-city comparison group on that measure in 2023.

The age categories count people killed or injured in crashes involving a driver in the listed age range; they are not counts of drivers. OTS also reported injury-or-fatal hit-and-run crashes increasing from 175 in 2017 to 238 in 2023, a 36% rise. The ranking pages do not establish that alcohol involvement and hit-and-run status overlapped in those cases.

What 'alcohol involved' means—and what it does not

OTS's alcohol-involved category counts victims killed or injured in a crash where any driver, pedestrian or bicyclist was coded as having been drinking. The definition includes people described as under the influence, not under the influence or with impairment unknown.

Accordingly, the figures are not counts of proven DUI-caused crashes, convictions, fatalities or individual impaired drivers. 'Victims killed and injured' combines deaths and injuries and counts people, not crash events.

The reported DUI arrest figure is a separate California Department of Justice-derived measure. OTS cautions that not every city reports arrest data. The figures should therefore be described as arrests reported for Bakersfield, not necessarily every arrest made by the Bakersfield Police Department or every DUI arrest inside city limits.

The records raise an enforcement question, not a causal conclusion

The data establish that casualty exposure associated with alcohol rose sharply while a separate arrest measure declined. They do not explain whether enforcement activity changed, whether a smaller share of stops resulted in arrests, or whether shifts in traffic volume and drinking behavior drove the casualty trend.

The next accountability step is for local agencies to publish comparable annual figures for DUI stops, citations, arrests by agency, checkpoint and saturation-patrol hours, prosecutor filings and case outcomes. Without those measures, residents cannot tell whether the arrest trend reflects deployment, reporting or conduct on the road.

Methodology: What’s the Scoop With Broach transcribed seven OTS city pages, checked endpoint and seven-year totals, and calculated rates using each page's population estimate. Percentages are rounded to one decimal place. No interviews or new records responses are represented in this analysis.