Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/01/30/motorists-falsely-arrested-on.html
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Guy thinks he knows something and he’s gonna’ use it every chance he gets. Dude’s a doornob. Maybe somebody should have told him that grandma smokes pot too.
Or… maybe not.
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There literally is a roadside test for drug driving - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-39655137.
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But does it let you arbitrarily lock up and oppress those who disrespect you or don’t appear to be thoroughly cowed?
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To me the problem looks to me not the officers making mistakes. That shit happens and there’s nothing you can do about it. Even the officer they went after in the first part was mostly correct (6? wrong out of 90).
The problem seems to be how they handle those cases where they suspect drugs. Guilty until proven innocent is the real problem here.
If they would just take the blood sample and bring someone home, with some apologies an advance for the inconvenience, people would be a lot more understanding when there’s a mistake.
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And now today’s Carrie Nations want to lower the legal blood alcohol limit, thus creating millions more victimless crimes every year.
This is the equivalent of reducing the definition of grand larceny to $10.00 under the theory that we can thus eliminate bank robberies.
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Drunk driving is now victimless?
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The millions of new “crimes” which would result from reducing the BAC from .08 to .05 - while preventing almost no new drunk driving accidents - are as close to victimless as to be effectively zero.
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That would imply that people with BAC between 8 and 5 have “effectively zero” accidents, or maybe the accidents they have don’t matter. I’m afraid a citation is needed.
“Give back my keys, I can drive just fine” is not a valid defense.
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It looks like more of a system problem than a bad-cop problem. I mean, he’s acting pretty much how you would hope he would act in a real DUI case, and false positives are better than false negatives here.
What it looks like is that the system is failing to acknowledge the concept of false positives, probably because people are nuance-proof dumdums who think talking like that means you love crime. The thinking should be, “our system is working great, and when we wrongly arrest people we should make it right immediately, and recognise that those people are the victims of a harmful accident caused by us”.
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“…and give them proper compensation.”
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Drug recognition officers are law enforcements version of “the men that stare @ goats”
Imagine being able to ruin someone’s life and reputation after a 1 day seminar taught by self described experts!
Saying anyone can identify the drugs in someone’s system without lab tests and then allowing this testimony into the record is a sign of how far away our country has gotten away from scientific method and into the realm of fantasy
Testimony from these frauds should be disallowed in all courts.
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Of course it’s Georgia. Jesus christ…
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Well, Cobb County anyway. Their cops are pretty notorious on traffic stops.
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Everyone has these experts. There’s at least 2 in my local PD
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one of 250 Georgia officers who have gone through a month-long training course.
So they taste your blood and then pronounce you intoxicated. My we’ve come a long way…
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The question (and I don’t know the numbers so I can’t do the math) would be do those people with above 5 and below 8 get into more accidents than those with zero… if it’s not a statistically significant increase of accidents then yeah it would be innocent people being locked up.
I would bet there’s an impact, based on my trying to play Dark Souls with just one beer, and making bad decisions that I couldn’t explain.
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That’s false, and sounds to this experienced ear, much more like rationalization than rationale
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A completely sober person can have an accident. So, the logical question to ask is whether those in the in-between category have a significantly higher rate of accidents over baseline…
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