They see you when you’re driving, they’ll know if you’re impaired.

Last holiday season, police gifted 12 people with impaired driving charges and another 71 with 24 hour suspensions.

Year to date, there have been nearly 1600 people drunk behind the wheel in the Calgary area, with 579 collisions involving alcohol or drugs, two of them deadly.

The Calgary Police Service traffic unit is ramping up its Checkstop program for the Christmas season.

Constable Andrew Fairman isn’t going to give away any of those locations.

“We could be around any corner, so be prepared to run into a Checkstop through the month of December.”

Fairman has worked in the traffic unit for almost a decade and he’s specially trained to detect drug-impaired drivers as well.

Despite his years of experience, the officer says he still runs into some alarming cases; such as one test that came back showing the driver was six times over the legal limit.