Public attitudes, social movement organizations, and criminal justice laws regarding drunk driving have undergone significant changes in recent years. These changes raise important questions about police, who act as gatekeepers for the rest of the criminal justice system. Very little, however, is known about what police did in the years when drunk driving was viewed as a less serious social problem or about what police do now. This article attempts to describe the earlier period, using data collected in the early 1970s, and to provide a baseline for contemporary research. City police did not give contacts with drunk drivers a high priority, preferred to avoid these encounters, and made arrests on the basis of both legal and extralegal factors, with extralegal factors the more important. The baseline data developed in this study suggest that at least some of the "manners and customs" of contemporary city police would be entirely familiar to the officers who worked the streets more than a quarter-century ago. Notes, figure, tables, references