Deputies from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department DUI Enforcement Team hold saturation patrols in Laguna Niguel tonight.

Laguna Niguel is a contract city for the sheriff’s department, so deputies conduct normal patrols there. Saturday patrols put extra deputies on streets known for drunken driving arrests, crashes and deaths.

Tonight’s is scheduled to run from 6 p.m. to 2 a.m.

When it comes to the need for such an operation, deputies point to research showing that alcohol-involved collisions led to 1,155 deaths and nearly 24,000 injuries in California in 2014, the sheriff’s department having investigated 149 DUI collisions over the past three years that killed 10 and injured 45, and high visibility enforcement using checkpoints and saturation patrols has lowered the number of people killed and injured in alcohol- or drug-impaired crashes.

Funding comes to the Orange County Sheriff’s Department for the patrols from a California Office

of Traffic Safety grant, through the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.