Another OVI Checkpoint Tonight: This one on McCord

Typical of the slow erosion of constitutional rights in this country.

Thanks JohnnyMac. My Main Lady lives in that area, so I'll be little more careful than usual.

Always amazed by the irony here.

Thousands of men died so that we could have the Constitution so that we can throw the Constitution under the bus to "save one life."

Thanks. I'll be coming home around 10:00 pm that way from an event which will serve wine and beer. I'll just avoid the whole area.

Justread...I agree wholeheartedly. Here is a quote that speaks to what you wrote:

"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."

Is the over/under line 1.5 for number of persons actually detained?

But...but...but...children and safety and puppies and kittens and death!

<headdesk>

I am still of the opinion that drunk driving arrests should be based on performance and not an arbitrary BAC that continues to fall to lower and lower levels.

For the record, I do not drink. I used to drink, and I used to have something of a tolerance for ethyl alcohol. If I were to have just one drink these days, I bet I would be noticeably impaired, even if my BAC was well below .08. Yet in my drinking days, I suspect I could have been at or slightly over the .08 mark and still be functional (this was back in the Wild West days of .10 and .12 being the legal definition of intoxication, kids).

Do I think drinking and driving should be legal? Hell no! Should drunk drivers who cause damage or bring harm to others face stiff penalties? Hell yes! When I see what appears to be an intoxicated driver, I phone the person in to 911. Just two weeks ago I saw an idiot driving on Monroe Street about 20 mph at night with no lights on and weaving all over the road. I trust that the drunken fool was easy to find, though after the dispatcher got the info I moved on; I was already late for a function and did not have time to play cop.

I just grow weary of this obsession with lower and lower BAC levels, when the real problem has to do with performance. As the above posters pointed out, these DUI checkpoints are a waste of time and money, and they rarely turn up drunk drivers. You really want to reduce drunk driving fatalities? Sit outside the rowdy bars in town between 11:45 pm and 2:45 am and pull over the people who stumbled toward their cars. Arrest them before they get out on the highway and kill someone.

Also: in this age of the ubiquitous digital camera, especially on police cruisers, documenting performance issues is ridiculously easy. Weaving drivers, slow down/speed up drivers, and other erratic drivers should be a high priority.

Better yet: change the culture that subtly reinforces drunkenness. Sure, the big beer and liquor companies drop in the occasional "drink responsibly" taglines, but if anything this is almost a smirking comment: wink wink, nudge nudge, keep drinking and buying our hootch, Bubba, because hot chicks will dig you and you will be the life of the party and all your favorite celebrities party all fucking night long, too! As long as it is still fashionable/funny/trendy to be falling down drunk, then drunken idiots with impaired judgment about their driving abilities will crawl behind the wheel and put others at risk.

This, of course, is heresy in the 21st century, since we are having a collective love affair with laws mandating ever-shrinking BAC levels while simultaneously embracing a culture of Drunk-O-Mania. I suspect I will live long enough to see .05 be the new standard, and yet all this will do is provide job security for those in the DUI industry.

The courts have ruled that these checkpoints MUST/SHALL be advertised in the media, in advance. That is why we hear about them before they go up and have the opportunity to avoid them. It also makes them pretty lame. Anybody caught in one of these is not paying attention.

They alaways do the Dorr/McCord are. Move it to Bancroft/Centennial or King and corral the Ventura crowd if you want to be effective.

These checkpoints are Jim Avolt's fault.

Ok, I'm going to predict they will stop, about 560 cars, will have 1 dui arrest, 2 people arrested on outstanding warrants, and of course, 5 tickets for not wearing seat belts.

But, just think, how great is it that there is so little REAL crime that they have time to infringe on the freedom of ordinary citizens.

What the hell did jimavolt do to cause the government to infringe on our rights?

What, it's jimavolt's fault?? GET THE PITCHFORKS!! Let's GET HIM!!

Did you just "Bob Dole" yourself?"

Two questions:

1. Are you allowed to stand a 1/2 mile down the road with a sign that says "Police Check Point 1/2 Mile"? I would assume you are allowed, they published it in the paper.

2. Anyone up for doing a OVI Mob at one of these? Lets get about 100 cars in line for the checkpoint, once through, turn around and go through the other way.

Great ideas, smbfc, but they'd get you for Obstruction of Justice or something, claiming that you are impeding officers of the law doing their jobs. But, hey, they couldn't get you for loitering on #2.

I can't believe you people. You might think differently if a drunk driver ran into you.

@deere1. Justread said it best: "Thousands of men died so that we could have the Constitution so that we can throw the Constitution under the bus to "save one life."

The question is, do you agree that we have constitutional rights or not?

I would not. Most of the people who posted probably wouldn't think any differently either.

There are two issues here. One, our constitutional rights are being violated due to the supposed interests of one or more special interest groups. MADD, SADD, GLADD... whatever. They can bitch and whine all they want, but the completely spineless group of bottom feeders calling themselves supreme court judges should have ruled their efforts unconstitutional.

Two, this is not about drunk driving or even impaired driving. This is about really poor driving. Check the list of idiots who have managed to get busted for DUI and see what other violations they have. These people can't drive safely when they're stone cold sober, let alone drunk as a Judge. Don't bother with drunk drivers. Remove unsafe drivers from the road and don't let them drive again until they've proven that they are able. Prevent unsafe drivers from being on the road in the first place by instituting a comprehensive driver's exam instead of the joke that we have now.

MADD has existed for 30 years and we still have drunk drivers. Maybe MADD and their Draconian methods are not effective at deterring drunk driving. Certainly their methods are ineffective against deterring unsafe driving.

Deere1: I would not either.

I don't want people to drive drunk. I think that it is really dangerous. When I see someone that I think is impaired due to their performance, I call 911. I think that police should watch for this and pull people over when they have probable cause. I think that prosecutors should pursue these folks as aggressively as the law will allow.

But I don't think that checkpoints are constitutional. They cast a rather wide net at the expense of personal liberty. I'd rather die free than live in a country where my travel is can be randomly impeded by the state for no reason or cause, just in case I am guilty of something.

The supreme court failed on this.

I'd be OK with checkpoints if they were actually effective at getting truly unsafe impaired drivers off the road, even if just for one night.

But drunks who know about the checkpoints in advance don't stop drinking & driving for the night - they just take a different route home.

Just like how the speed and red light cameras are now spots where people obey the speed limit and don't run lights, but they damn well speed through red lights everywhere else. The only people you catch are the true idiots, and by the process of evolution, that leads to everyone else getting smarter about how they go about evading the law.

Darwin called. He just shook his head and hung up.

Tell me I'm wrong. Watch traffic down the Trail now, and how there's a sudden slowdown at the new speed camera followed by everyone zipping at 55-60 past that.

You are right about that. I look forward to seeing how that works on ice.
What it is doing is bunching up traffic. I keep watching for somebody to get caught, but I haven't seen the lights flash. I think that they have succeeded in disrupting traffic flow. Fast, smoothly dispersed traffic is far safer than traffic with bunching and speed differentials.
Don't get me started on the serial lane jumpers.