DUI Attorney in Barstow

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 Barstow

Barstow runs its own police department — it is not a city that contracts with the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department for patrol. The Barstow Police Department, headquartered at 220 E. Mt. View Street, Suite B (non-emergency (760) 255-5111, 24-hour dispatch (760) 256-2211), fields a roughly 40-officer force covering the city's roughly 40 square miles and more than 23,000 residents. Confusingly, the County Sheriff also keeps a station almost directly across the street — the Barstow Patrol Station, 225 E. Mt. View Street — but that station patrols the vast unincorporated High Desert around the city (Yermo, Daggett, Hinkley, Lenwood, Ludlow, Newberry Springs, Baker, and Trona, among others, across more than 9,200 square miles), not the city of Barstow itself. On the freeways, the California Highway Patrol's Barstow Area office, 300 E. Mountain View Street ((760) 255-5900), handles enforcement — its patrol area is geographically the second-largest in the entire CHP system, covering 130 miles of I-15 between Apple Valley and the Nevada state line, 80 miles of I-40 out to Kelbaker Road, State Routes 247, 127 and 58, U.S. 395, and roughly 1,400 county roads, plus the Mojave National Preserve.

California's Office of Traffic Safety tracked 43 DUI arrests in Barstow in 2023, ranking the city 43rd out of 103 comparable cities in its population group (Group E, average population 24,947), and 10 people killed or injured in alcohol-involved collisions, ranking 45th out of 103. Those numbers put Barstow in the middle of its peer group — steady, active enforcement rather than an outlier in either direction.

• Barstow PD's patrol division and the CHP Barstow Area office both run DUI enforcement — Barstow PD inside city limits, CHP on I-15, I-40, and the surrounding state highways.
• Fort Irwin's own Provost Marshal office runs 24-hour law enforcement on post, including its own sobriety checkpoints inside the National Training Center's boundaries.
• The Marine Corps Logistics Base Barstow, west of the city, is a separate installation with its own on-base security — both bases sit inside the CHP Barstow Area's broader patrol footprint.

Where a Barstow DUI case is heard — not at Barstow's own courthouse

Barstow is one of the rare California cities with a real, functioning local courthouse that still can't hear a DUI case. The Barstow District, 235 East Mountain View Street, is confirmed directly on the San Bernardino County Superior Court's own "Where Can I File?" page and on the Barstow District's own location page to handle only Small Claims, Landlord-Tenant, Civil, Family Law, Child Support, and Traffic and Non-Traffic Infractions — no felony or misdemeanor criminal calendar at all. Every Barstow DUI, whether a first-offense misdemeanor or a felony DUI causing injury, is instead filed at the Victorville District, 14455 Civic Drive, Suite 200, Victorville, CA 92392, roughly 30 miles southwest of Barstow — the same courthouse that hears DUIs from the surrounding unincorporated communities of Yermo, Lenwood, Daggett, Hinkley, Trona, and Baker.

The Superior Court's own March 2021 "High Desert Reorganization Information Sheet" lays out the mechanism behind that split: the Barstow courthouse's old Public Defender, District Attorney, and Sheriff spaces were remodeled into a full-service family-law courthouse, and the court's stated rationale was that moving family-law services to Barstow would "provide opportunity to open additional criminal courtroom(s) at the Victorville Courthouse, allowing for more adequately balanced criminal caseloads and better response to anticipated growing criminal caseloads." In other words, Barstow's criminal docket — DUIs included — moved to Victorville as part of a deliberate space swap, not an oversight. The San Bernardino County District Attorney's Office prosecutes every Barstow DUI at Victorville; the courthouse's criminal information line is (760) 245-6215.

Barstow's place as a High Desert crossroads — and what that means after an arrest

Barstow sits at the junction of Interstate 15 and Interstate 40, roughly midway between Los Angeles and Las Vegas — a position that made it a stopover and maintenance town on old Route 66 long before the interstates replaced it, and still drives a steady stream of through traffic, truckers, and weekend Las Vegas drivers today. The city is also a freight hub: BNSF Railway traces its yard here to the Santa Fe Railroad's 1888 arrival and still runs one of its largest classification yards in Barstow, handling thousands of rail cars a day; the company has proposed a $1.5 billion "Barstow International Gateway" intermodal rail facility on roughly 4,500 acres on the city's west side.

Two major military installations sit near Barstow and fall inside the CHP Barstow Area's patrol footprint: the Army's Fort Irwin National Training Center, one of the military's largest maneuver-training ranges, and the Marine Corps Logistics Base Barstow. Both run their own on-post law enforcement — Fort Irwin's Provost Marshal office, for example, runs its own sobriety checkpoints inside the installation — but a DUI arrest off-post, on I-15, I-40, or anywhere within Barstow city limits, goes through the ordinary civilian process and still lands at the Victorville District, not a military court. If your California license is on the line, the DMV field office serving Barstow is at 528 E Virginia Way, but the 10-day deadline to request a DMV hearing runs from the date of arrest regardless of which office eventually processes the paperwork — see our DMV hearing page for how that works.

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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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