The Aurora Police Department was once again the top municipality for DUI arrests in the Alliance Against Intoxicated Motorists’ recently released annual survey.
The Aurora department made 479 drunken driving arrests in 2025, the survey results show, a slight uptick from last year’s figures.
AAIM is a Schaumburg-based citizen activist group founded in 1982 by victims of drunk driving. It has been conducting a statewide survey of Illinois police departments annually since 1990 to analyze the number of DUI arrests police make each year, which is funded by a grant from the Illinois Department of Transportation.
This past year, nearly 700 police agencies were surveyed, with 84% responding, according to a news release from AAIM.
Due to its size, the Chicago Police Department is separated into its own category and not included on AAIM’s ranked list of municipalities. In 2025, for comparison, Chicago police made close to 3,000 DUI arrests, according to AAIM. Also not part of AAIM’s list, the Illinois State Police made 3,662 DUI arrests last year.
Aurora has held onto the list’s top spot since 2022, according to past AAIM survey results, seeing a gradual increase over the past few years in the number of DUI arrests made.
This past year, Aurora was followed closely by Rockford, which saw a more than 32% uptick in DUI arrests from 2024 to 2025, according to the recent survey results. Other nearby municipalities that ranked high on AAIM’s 2025 list include Naperville and Elgin.
The survey also looks at county sheriff departments.
Will County ranked first on the county level for DUI arrests in 2025, with 235, according to AAIM’s survey. Kane County, ranked ninth, making 115 arrests, while Kendall ranked 15th with 79 arrests and DuPage 18th with 69 arrests for the year.
With 336 sworn officers, Aurora had a rate of 1.43 DUI arrests per sworn officer, according to AAIM. The city of O’Fallon had the highest DUI arrest rate, with five arrests per sworn officer.
“Every arrest tells a story of officers who put themselves in harm’s way to protect our families, communities, and neighbors — their courage and compassion stop tragedies before they happen and spare families a lifetime of grief,” Rita Kreslin, AAIM’s executive director, said in the news release from AAIM about the 2025 results.
Five Aurora officers were recognized in the annual survey for making the most DUI arrests in 2025. They were Nicole Holland with 55 arrests, Emmaline Waid with 40, Logan Heinke with 31, Megan Scott with 26 and Ryan Rolfes with 25.
“Mostly, it reflects on the hard work and dedication of our individual officers,” Aurora Police Department Deputy Chief Steven Stemmet said of the results.
More Top Picks Bernette 35
Stemmet told The Beacon-News that Aurora has been “fortunate” to see a “pretty dramatic decrease in violent crime” in recent years, which means officers have had more time to focus on making the streets safer from impaired drivers.
Nevertheless, the department still gets a high volume of calls, Stemmet noted, and therefore doesn’t typically have “dedicated DUI officers out there.” But they do have officers with specialized training that “help build their DUI skill set.”
Stemmet also pointed to an increase in traffic stop numbers in the years after the COVID-19 pandemic, saying this has the potential effect of officers catching more impaired drivers. That increase he attributed in part to the work of the department’s officers, as well as the department having added more officers to its force in recent years.
“When they’re not handling calls, we expect our officers to be out there working for the citizens,” Stemmet said. “And I think the numbers prove that that’s exactly what they’re doing.”
Traffic safety generally has been one of the department’s main goals over the past few years, and Stemmet said it’s a “reflection of the officers that we have here” that its officers “take those goals … to heart and go out there and try to accomplish them for the betterment of our citizens.”
And, as new officers join the department, they see that DUI enforcement is “such an important goal here,” Stemmet said.
The department can focus on drunken driving enforcement through securing grant money that enables them to hire officers to focus specifically on DUI enforcement, Stemmet noted. It also puts out surveys to the community and gets back results about traffic safety issues in certain areas.
In the future, Stemmet said the department is going to keep DUI enforcement a priority. And he said that the department or its individual officers being recognized for their efforts to make DUI arrests “sends a pretty clear message to people out there that, if you want to make a bad decision and get behind the wheel when you’re impaired, that (the department is) going to hold you accountable.”
“I think what we have been doing shows that it works,” Stemmet said of efforts to address impaired driving. “So we’re kind of continuing on the same course.”