Drive down a main drag in Missoula at 3 a.m. and you’ll see two cars. One, parked on the street and the police car that pulled the first one over to administer a sobriety test. Yes, drunk driving is bad, but the the trend toward lowering the legal limits to levels that would be tripped by a few sprays of Binacca is disturbing. The police are better served if the people they are supposed to protect aren’t perpetually afraid of them.
And then I read something like this.
On a Monday morning last month, highway patrol officers visited 20 classrooms at El Camino High School to announce some horrible news: Several students had been killed in car wrecks over the weekend.
Classmates wept. Some became hysterical.
A few hours and many tears later, though, the pain turned to fury when the teenagers learned that it was all a hoax - a scared-straight exercise designed by school officials to dramatize the consequences of drinking and driving.
Too far? I think so.
Posted in Nanny State, pontification | | Write a Letter to the Editor
I don’t get your objection to the traffic stop you describe at the top of the post. Is it that the police should not be able to conduct stops without probable cause (in which case I totally agree with you) or is it that the B.A.C. legal limit is too low?
My biggest problem is that at 3 a.m. a drunk driver isn’t really that big a threat to anyone but themselves. The roads are empty. So we’re paying an army of cops to pull people over for failing to signal 10 feet before a turn (true story, I got pulled over for that one), and then issuing a sobriety test for the hell of it.
There are far too many DUIs issued in Missoula - considering how rare a drunk-driving fatality is. A DUI can ruin someone’s life, and our city government is proud of how many they can write.
(For the record, I’ve never had a DUI, but I have been field tested a few times).
Wow.
I can certainly agree with you that the police should not be conducting searches without cause, but to suggest that drunk drivers aren’t a threat to anyone else is absurd, at any hour.
If someone is impaired, they should be arrested. A DUI can certainly hurt someone, but if you can afford to go out and drink, you can certainly afford a cab.
