DUI Attorney in Adelanto

Reviewed by Ron Chini, Esq. · CA State Bar No. 263308 · DUI defense attorney in Irvine, CA since 2009.
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How DUIs are policed in Adelanto

Adelanto incorporated on December 22, 1970 — at the time, the county's smallest city — and ran its own municipal police department for roughly three decades afterward. That ended in the early 2000s: the department's chief position went vacant in 2001, the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department stepped in temporarily to cover patrol duties at no cost while the city decided what to do, and by 2002 Adelanto had formally contracted with the Sheriff for full-time law enforcement rather than rebuilding its own force. DUI patrol today runs out of the Sheriff's Victor Valley Station, 11613 Bartlett Avenue, Adelanto, CA 92301, (760) 552-6800 — a station that sits inside Adelanto's own city limits and also covers the unincorporated communities of Helendale, Oro Grande, Silver Lakes, and El Mirage.

Adelanto's real, well-documented public-corruption history is a separate story from that early-2000s police transition, and the two shouldn't be conflated: it centers on the city's later push into the cannabis industry. Former Mayor Pro Tem Jermaine Wright was convicted at trial of accepting a $10,000 cash bribe from an undercover FBI agent in exchange for help expanding Adelanto's marijuana-business zone (prosecutors also charged him with paying someone to burn down his own restaurant for the insurance money) and was sentenced to five years in federal prison. His successor, Mayor Richard Kerr, was indicted in 2018 on seven counts of honest-services wire fraud and two counts of bribery, accused of taking more than $57,000 in disguised payments — gifts, campaign donations, and a lawsuit settlement advance — for approving cannabis permits while sitting on the city's own Cannabis Dispensary Permit Committee. The CHP also patrols Adelanto's stretch of U.S. Route 395, the main route connecting the city to Victorville and the rest of the Victor Valley.

Where an Adelanto DUI case is heard

A DUI arrest anywhere in Adelanto is filed at the Victorville Courthouse, 14455 Civic Drive, Victorville, CA 92392 — the San Bernardino County Superior Court's dedicated criminal hub for the entire High Desert, and Adelanto is named directly on that courthouse's own "Areas Served" list. The San Bernardino County District Attorney's Office prosecutes the case regardless of whether it's a misdemeanor or a felony; the Victorville Courthouse's own page does not describe routing felony DUIs to a different building, so there's no separate felony venue to flag here.

Booking, two very different detention centers, and getting a car back

An Adelanto DUI arrest typically books at the Sheriff's High Desert Detention Center, 9438 Commerce Way — a jail the department itself describes as holding more than 2,100 inmates, and one that sits inside Adelanto's own city limits. That's a separate facility from the better-known Adelanto ICE Processing Center nearby: a complex originally built by the city in 1991 as a state prison for CDCR inmates, sold to the GEO Group in June 2010 for roughly $28 million, placed under a federal immigration-detention contract with ICE starting in 2011, and expanded by 2015 to hold close to 1,940 immigration detainees — an entirely different population from anyone booked on a local DUI charge, but one that makes Adelanto home to two of the High Desert's largest detention operations at once.

Your car is a separate matter from the arrest itself. A routine tow after a DUI stop usually lets you, or someone you authorize, retrieve the vehicle from the tow yard once you handle the release paperwork and towing/storage fees. A mandatory 30-day impound under Vehicle Code §14602.6 is a different, more serious outcome — it applies only when the driver was also unlicensed, or on a suspended, revoked, or interlock-restricted license, not to a DUI arrest by itself. Ask us to check which situation applies to your stop during your free consultation.

The Green Zone, a cannabis gamble, and a fast-changing desert city

Adelanto was an early mover in California's commercial cannabis industry — one of only two San Bernardino County cities (alongside Needles) to accommodate licensed marijuana businesses when the city first opened the door in 2015, ahead of the state's broader 2016 legalization vote. The city leaned into large, vacant industrial buildings left over from its detention-center-driven economy, rezoning a stretch of town into what became known locally as "The Green Zone" and issuing dozens of cultivation and, eventually, storefront retail dispensary permits — a path its closer Victor Valley neighbors didn't fully follow: Apple Valley's code enforcement shut down an unpermitted dispensary rather than licensing one, and Hesperia limited its own cannabis ordinance to delivery-only operations rather than storefront retail. The 2018 bribery prosecutions described above grew directly out of that same permitting push, and the city later leaned on county-subsidized sheriff's deputies to help shore up its public-safety budget. Named from the Spanish word for "advance" or "progress" by founder E.H. Richardson in 1915, Adelanto's early fruit orchards gave way to poultry ranches by the Depression era; as of the 2020 Census the city had grown to 38,046 residents with a median age of 29.2, among the youngest populations in the Victor Valley.

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Ron Chini, Esq.

DUI Defense Attorney · CA State Bar No. 263308

Ron defends DUI cases across Southern California from his Irvine office, in English and Farsi — and works directly with you, not a call center.

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