Random breath tests for DUI is a bad idea

According to the National Post, the Commons Justice committee has recommended:

“that police officers be given the power to conduct random roadside breath tests on drivers, a change that would remove the legal requirement for officers to have a "reasonable" suspicion that drivers are drunk.

Under current provincial and federal law, police can stop a vehicle to check the condition of the driver, including his or her sobriety. Police cannot request a breath sample unless they reasonably suspect that a driver is drunk.

The Commons justice committee recommended in a report released Thursday that police be able to request a breath test at any time, regardless of whether the driver smells of alcohol or shows signs of impairment.”

This idea is absolutely flat out wrong. In a free society it should be the case that a citizen can move about at will without ever being hindered by the police. The job of the police officer, who used to be called a peace officer, is to keep the public peace. If the public peace has not been broken he should leave well enough alone, not go around making criminals out of people minding their own business. It is for that reason that the traditional requirement of ‘reasonable grounds” was put into place.

I know that we have had RIDE spot-checks for years, but I have been always been against them for the same reason. Fortunately, the Supreme Court has progressively narrowed the RIDE loophole. Once upon a time, a RIDE stop was an open invitation for the cops to go on a fishing expedition. I was pulled over at a RIDE spot-check once, and when the cops did not smell liquor on my breadth, they proceeded to do a safety check on my car and search my trunk. I remember thinking that this should not happen in a free society. Evidently the Supreme Court agreed with me because they subsequently ruled that now, all the police can do at those spot-checks is to ask if you had anything to drink. Period. No, “where are you going? where are you coming from? what’s in your trunk?” That stuff was no longer allowed.

But if this new idea gets implemented, it will become open season again on every motorist, no matter how well they are driving.

Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MAD) is an organization suffering from a bad case of mission creep. What I mean by that is that, like the feminist movement before it, most of the reasonable things they have wanted they have gotten, but because nobody wants to close up shop, they have moved on to hectoring citizens on matters that are increasingly petty and intrusive.

Take the movement to lower the permissible blood alcohol level from 0.08 to 0.05. According to the same Post article, MAD says that “0.05 level represents the threshold at which a driver is sufficiently impaired to ‘present an imminent danger to himself and others.’” Logical fiddlesticks! At that level of impairment I bet most people are better at driving a car than somebody who is tired, coming home from night shift, over 80 years old or just plain inexperienced.  To be consistent, do we need to take their licenses away too?

One statistic the MAD bunch doesn’t like to mention is the fact that half of the people killed by drunk drivers have at least double the legal blood alcohol limit. They don’t like it because it implies that, on a sliding scale, drivers who are barely over the legal limit are probably not that bad. It suggests that problems associated with drunk driving are overwhelmingly caused by a small cadre of hard-core problem drinkers who are sloshed behind the wheel. Unfortunately, these are also the people who are the least responsive to legal incentives, so MAD - and the law - targets ordinary people who have a glass or two of sherry instead.

The ‘carnage on the freeways’ is not caused by people with two beers in them, and it is not caused by motorists who drive so well that the police have no cause to pull them over. The fact that a driver is so competent behind the wheel of a car that a peace officer can find nothing wrong in his driving to criticize should be a compelling argument in his mind to leave him alone.

Comments

[NeilD]

Giving police the authority to pull drivers over for no reason and to demand a breathalyzer is just plain wrong. I don't think a law such as this will stand up under close scrutiny.
Our Justice Minister has too close a relationship with MADD, recently receiving a Citizen of Distinction Award at their national confrence.
The police wear MADD traffic vests during stop-checks.
I agree that MADD is far too over-zealous preaching zero-tolerence in all aspects of life where the operation of a motorized vehicle is concerned. Boats, Ski Doos, snowmobiles. The gamut.
Even trespassing on railway property.
http://www.madd.ca/english/news/stories/n20080428.htm
We're creeping back toward prohibition here and they must be stopped.
NeilD

[WiseGuy]

Here's the other thing. With all the spot checks, education, propaganda and harassment, there are still car accidents. The real problem is that you can never prevent car accidents. Making errors is a natural thing that humans do. We do it whether we have been drinking or not. By buying into the premise that drinking is the predominant cause of accidents, society has crippled itself into thinking that car accidents can be prevented by ever more draconian laws.

The truth is that spot checks have done all they are going to do. If you prohibited alcohol, it may do a little more, but probably not much.

The most useful thing would be to build bigger, safer cars, but that would be politically incorrect.