New York State Police issued 7,798 traffic tickets and arrested 243 people for driving while intoxicated during the three-day Halloween enforcement campaign that ran from Friday, October 30, through Sunday, November 1, the agency announced on Friday, November 13. Troopers also investigated 694 crashes during the campaign, including two fatal crashes.
Source: New York State Police
The campaign combined sobriety checkpoints with additional DWI patrols across the state. Beyond impaired driving, troopers focused on speeding, distracted driving, aggressive driving and underage drinking. The initiative was partly funded by the Governor's Traffic Safety Committee. The arrests are allegations, not convictions, and the people arrested were not identified in the release.
Source: New York State Police via Voice of the Mohawk Valley
Where the tickets landed
The agency's selected category totals show speeding as by far the largest share, with 2,778 speeding tickets. Troopers wrote 304 tickets for seat belt and child-restraint violations, 178 for distracted driving and 152 for Move Over Law violations — the rule that requires drivers to slow down and move over for emergency and roadside vehicles. The State Police said these are selected categories, not a complete list adding up to the 7,798 total.
Regional figures in the release show the Central New York troop area recording 728 total tickets and 17 DWI arrests. In the Southern Tier, troopers made 20 DWI arrests and issued 299 speeding tickets, according to television station WYDC's report of the same release.
Source: WYDC-TV
Higher than last year
For the 2025 Halloween initiative, which ran from October 31 through November 2, State Police reported 7,651 tickets and 196 DWI arrests. This year's totals were therefore 147 tickets and 47 DWI arrests higher. Those changes describe enforcement outcomes: by themselves they do not establish how common impaired driving was among all drivers on the road, and the release does not provide a count of traffic stops or another measure of how much driving took place in the two periods.
Why Halloween gets its own campaign
The State Police results close out a wider Halloween safety mobilization that Governor Hochul announced on October 26, under which State Police and local law enforcement increased patrols from October 25 through October 31, funded by the Governor's Traffic Safety Committee. That announcement, citing the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, said 201 people were killed in alcohol-related crashes on Halloween night between 2019 and 2024 involving at least one driver with a blood alcohol level of .01 or higher, and 176 people were killed in crashes involving a drunk driver at .08 or higher; the victims included 31 pedestrians. The Halloween mobilization is one of several coordinated, committee-funded enforcement waves held during the year.
Source: Governor's Traffic Safety Committee announcement via WNY Papers
These are New York State Police results only — not a combined tally for every police department in the state, since local police and sheriff's offices run their own enforcement. Two fatal crashes should not be read as a confirmed total of two deaths, and the release does not say that all 694 crashes involved impaired drivers. DWI arrests are charges, and each case is decided in court.
For the Punjabi and South Asian families who drive New York's highways for work — including the truckers who run the Thruway and the interstate corridors through the Hudson Valley, Central New York and the Southern Tier — the practical points are the checkpoints themselves, the 152 Move Over tickets, and the seat-belt and child-restraint enforcement: the Move Over Law exists to protect troopers, tow operators and road crews working at the roadside, a group that includes many immigrant drivers.
What happens next: the 243 DWI cases now proceed through local courts, where penalties on conviction can include fines, licence consequences and jail time under New York law, and the State Police have published the full troop-by-troop breakdown of the campaign in their release. The figures released on November 13 are the final totals for this year's Halloween campaign; drivers should expect the same committee-funded enforcement model to return for the next holiday travel periods.