We are all part of the potential criminal class - draconian DUI laws are a racket and have both intuitive and counter-intuitive results...

...the counter-intuitive result is that lowering the BAC to .08 has led to more fatalities as cops have moved their enforcement from a behavior - impaired driving - to a symbol - a threshhold blood alcohol content.

The intuitive result is that by making law-abiding people into criminals the State has found a new source of revenue and power.

Drunk driving enforcement in this country has become a racket. It’s not about safety, it’s about money. Actually, the drive over the past two decades to lower the legal limit of alcohol for drivers has likely made traffic less safe. It has undoubtedly, though, put millions of dollars into the coffers of various jurisdictions via fines and vehicle confiscation. Additional millions have lined the pockets of police officers via overtime pay to appear in court and to man sobriety checkpoints.


The cynic in me says that as long as police officers and municipalities see drinking drivers as cash cows and hide behind the fig leaf of “traffic safety”, arbitrary standards based on BAC will continue even though they may be counterproductive. In fact, after there was a national push by Mothers Against Drunk Driving to lower the legal BAC limits nationally from 0.10% to 0.08%, backed up by federal pressure on states, alcohol-related traffic fatalities went up in 2000, after 20 straight years of going down. That increase shouldn’t have been surprising. The push for a de facto national limit of 0.08% came after a 1995 NHTSA study already showed that some states that lowered the BAC limits were less safe than before. Those lower limits may have meant a windfall of revenue to jurisdictions and individual police officers, but they didn’t necessarily make us any safer. They may have led to more booze related driving injuries and deaths.

How do lower BAC limits mean more alcohol related accidents? Because those lower BAC limits in most cases led to the institution of sobriety check lanes, legal in all but 9 states. Assuming that the purpose of those checkpoints is genuinely to catch drinking drivers and not just put money into municipal coffers and cops’ pockets, I think it stands to reason that the rationale is to catch those drinking drivers that conventional on the road enforcement wasn’t catching. The idea, I suppose, was that if you check every driver, you’ll find the ones who have been drinking but aren’t impaired enough to catch attention from police or other drivers. In other words, the purpose of the check lanes is to catch drivers who aren’t driving dangerously, except for the fact that they have a particular amount of alcohol in their system.

Most drivers that have a BAC of between 0.08 and 0.10 percent are not driving badly enough to catch attention from police. They may be buzzed but they aren’t swerving, speeding badly, or failing to keeping up with traffic. When police are busy at a sobriety roadblock or setting up surveillance near restaurants and bars, they are not out on the roads trying to find more dangerously impaired drivers. Yes, they get some folks on the cusp of legal intoxication, generating lots of revenue in the process, but they don’t make the roads safer. A nighttime sobriety checkpoint might take more than 20 police officers away from tasks that actually make our roads safer. Only nine states don’t allow suspicionless sobriety checkpoints.

Using 2009 data collected by the University of California at Berkeley, California Watch showed that 1,600 sobriety checkpoints yielded 3,200 DWI arrests. An typical checkpoint would yield only two or three drunk driving arrests. Most of the checkpoint DWI arrests involved people close to the legal limit, rather than at high levels of intoxication. When you consider how many hundreds of drivers get stopped at each of those checkpoints, it hardly seems productive to catch a tiny number of drivers that are over the legal limit but may or may not be dangerously impaired, while at the same time seriously impaired drivers go unstopped because so much police manpower is devoted to sobriety checkpoints. Of course there are other serious crimes besides seriously impaired driving that go unchecked while the local PD or state police are busy pulling people over at checkpoints.

Well, that is, it hardly seems “productive” until you see the bottom line for the municipalities and the cops personally. Drunk driving and sobriety checkpoints are big business. To begin with, a single DUI conviction can mean thousands of dollars of revenue for the jurisdiction that issued the citation. That’s only the tip of the iceberg, though. While sobriety checkpoints don’t catch many seriously drunk drivers, they do nab folks for equipment infractions or other sorts of minor crimes and they end up generating a huge amount of revenue for those municipalities and police officers that do use checkpoints. That same California Watch story revealed that those 1,600 police checkpoints may have yielded just 3,200 arrests for DWI, but they resulted in $40 million in fines, plus $30 million in overtime pay for cops and a staggering 24,000 vehicle confiscations. Assuming that there are towing and storage fees involved in those confiscations, add on even more millions that are extracted from drivers, not to mention those vehicles that end up being part of a “civil” or criminal forfeiture case.

Thirty million dollars in the pockets of cops, $40 million in revenue for their employers, over twenty thousand cars confiscated, all without much proof that seriously impaired driver have been gotten off of the roads.

In the real world we call that a racket.

Now, here is a story that really needed the four photos and the dashboard videotape from the arresting police officer's squadcar...

..."Topless Woman in G-String Arrested After Leading Police on 128mph Car Chase"--headline, Daily Mail (London), Oct. 27

A topless and drunken woman led police on a car chase along route 422 at speeds of up to 128mph before surrendering to officers.


Erin B. Holdsworth, 28, of Hiram, Ohio, was found to be wearing only fishnet stockings, a g-string and high heels when she was arrested in Auburn Township.

It was such an important story that the London Daily Mail had to give it full coverage even though the arrest happened in Ohio!

Got to sell those newspapers somehow.

The Modernist Enterprise seems to be about making us all servile subjects by making sure that we can all be treated like criminals when necessary.

I stumbled across this case while reading the Daily Journal.  The net result of the case is that the defendant was permitted to sue the police for a civil rights violation with respect to their entry into his home without a warrant.  The attorney reporting the case represents the police in civil rights case and found the Ninth Circuit's decision to be outrageous; I find the police conduct to be outrageous.  Here is the statement of facts:

After discussing the circumstances, Officers Ericson and Mickelson decided to enter the residence: they continued to announce themselves and requested a response from the occupant as they entered. Officer Mickelson found Lockett in bed and began to question him. Lockett said that he did not require medical attention and that he did not answer the door because he was asleep. Officer Ericson said that Lockett could not have been asleep for very long because he had just crashed his car nearby; Lockett responded "I didn't crash, I just got stuck." The Officers asked Lockett to remove the blankets covering him, which revealed that he was fully dressed and also revealed a strong smell of alcohol. The Officers further observed that Lockett's eyes were red and watery. Officer Ericson asked Lockett if he owned the car at issue and he said yes. Officer Ericson also asked whether Lockett had drunk any alcohol since returning home and he responded no. Officer Ericson then requested that Lockett perform field sobriety tests, which Lockett did not successfully complete. At this time, Officer Ericson arrested Lockett for driving while under the influence of alcohol and took him to the Mt. Shasta Area CHP office where he underwent a breathalyser test. The result of the breathalyser was .17/.17.


The county prosecutor filed a misdemeanor complaint against Lockett on March 9, 2005, alleging one count of driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs in violation of California Vehicle Code section 23152(a), and one count of driving at .08 (or above) blood alcohol level in violation of California Vehicle Code section 23152(b). In the ensuing state court proceeding, Lockett filed a motion to suppress under California Penal Code section 1538.5, arguing that the evidence supporting the State's case against him was seized without a warrant in violation of his Fourth Amendment rights.

The trial court denied the motion to suppress, finding that the Officers were "reasonable in [their] suspicion of exigent circumstances regarding the well being of [Lockett]" and acted "properly in [their] role as a community caretaker in entering [Lockett's] residence to determine the need for assistance." The court further found that "[o]nce inside the residence . . . the officer[s] made plain sight observations which gave rise to probable cause to arrest [Lockett] for driving under the influence."

Lockett v. Ericson, 2011 U.S. App. LEXIS 18104, 3-5 (9th Cir. Cal. Aug. 31, 2011)
 
In other words, the police entered the home without a warrant for a misdemeanor vehicle code violation.  Then, they persist in trying to run up their DUI arrest score after the citizen says he doesn't need their assistance.
 
But instead of tossing this obvious violation of constitutional rights out of court, the trial judge decides to buy the police officers' obvious perjury about concern for the person's safety.
 
Even if we take everything at face value, there is something wildly lacking in wisdom and judgment in this Javert-style zeal in going after someone in their home in bed on a misdemeanor. Insofar as the state has a right to intrude on a person's home, they really should do it for serious matters, not for the million and one petty laws that clutter the lawbooks. 

If the police can't be induced to show better discretion about the use of their valuable time by outraged citizens with shotguns - which, of course, law-abiding citizens should never resort, but then the police should treat citizens as citizens rather than presumptive criminals - then perhaps the threat of liability under Section 1983 may encourage a cost/benefit analysis vis a vis intruding into someone's home over a misdemeanor.
 
Once again the Prophet Gilbert was pointing to the future when he observed that ""we do not get good laws to restrain bad people. We get good people to restrain bad laws."


G.K. Chesterton, Thoughts around Koepenick (1915).

Repeat three times - if it seems too good to be true...

...that's because it is.

DUI "entrapment" as a tactic in custody disputes:

Reporting from Martinez, Calif.— David Dutcher met Sharon on Match.com in late 2008, a few months after separating from his wife. "We had a lot in common," he recalled. Sharon loved four-wheel-drive trucks and sports.


They met for coffee, then dinner. Sharon was tall, slender, blond and beautiful. She moaned that she had not had sex in a long time. She told him he had large, strong hands and wondered if that portended other things. She described his kisses as "yummy."

"It felt a lot like Christmas," said Dutcher, 49, a tall, burly engineer with wavy red hair.

On their second date, Sharon suggested they join one of her friends "who was partying because she had closed a real estate deal," Dutcher said. They drove to an Italian restaurant in a suburb near San Francisco. Sharon's friend, "Tash," was a loud and raucous brunet who was pounding down shots.

The women fiddled with Dutcher's tie and massaged his neck and shoulders. The brunet unbuttoned her blouse to reveal generous cleavage. "I am way over my head with these girls," he remembered thinking. "I hadn't been out dating in a while."

Sharon had trouble finishing her tequila shots and asked Dutcher to help, he said. When the women went to the bathroom, two men at the other end of the bar peppered Dutcher with questions.

"Are you a celebrity?" they wanted to know.

The women suggested going to a house with a hot tub that Tash was housesitting, Dutcher said. He followed them in his truck. Within a few minutes, a flashing red light appeared in his rearview mirror. The officer said he had been swerving.

Three months later, Dutcher's wife filed a motion in their divorce case, telling the court that her soon-to-be former husband had been arrested on suspicion of drunk driving and that she feared for their children's safety. The judge ordered that Dutcher's visits be supervised.

Then, earlier this year, Dutcher received a letter from Contra Costa County Senior Deputy Dist. Atty. Harold W. Jewett. It contained a transcript of a police interview with Christopher Butler, a private detective and the subject of a state and federal criminal investigation.

"I hope in some small way this information will help you recoup both rights and dignities lost in one of the most deplorable legal practices I have ever heard of," Jewett wrote.

Dutcher had been duped.

The women who'd ogled him worked for Butler's detective agency. Sharon, who told Dutcher she was a divorcee employed by an investment firm, actually was a former Las Vegas showgirl.

A man who once worked for Butler had blown the whistle. He told authorities Butler arranged for men to be arrested for drunk driving at the behest of their ex-wives and their divorce lawyers — and that entrapment was only one of many alleged misdeeds.

Butler, 49, a former police officer, was arrested in February. In addition to setting up at least five DUIs, he sold drugs for law enforcement officers and helped them open and operate a brothel, collecting and delivering the profits, according to prosecutors and a statement Butler gave them after his arrest. 

And the official corruption angle:

In the March 15 statement obtained by The Times, Butler said his accomplices reasoned that they could shield their illegal businesses because any complaints would be investigated by a state-run narcotics task force, which one of the officers headed.


The alleged crimes implicated three different law enforcement agencies — the San Ramon and Danville police departments and the narcotics task force — and took place in Contra Costa County, a collection of mostly middle-class communities that stretch from the East Bay shoreline opposite San Francisco to upscale suburbs inland.

And:

Susan Dutcher, a substitute schoolteacher, said in a sworn declaration that she paid Butler $2,500 to obtain evidence that her husband drove while drinking. She insisted she did not authorize Butler to have him arrested because she did not want to imperil his job and his ability to pay child support.

Her lawyer's paralegal, who had recommended Butler, "made this all seem completely legal and as though it was standard practice" in divorce cases, she said.

Once Dutcher got into his truck, Butler called a police officer friend to report Dutcher had been drinking. Butler maintained the officer was not paid by him and did not know Dutcher had been set up. The officer, who has not been charged, later went to work for Butler.

Can you say "bee-yatches"?

Actually, in retrospect, Dutcher go lucky.  A pudgy, middle-aged redhead being hit on by hot, young blondes...they could just as easily have been part of a vampire cult or the scouts for an "organ-legger."