About ten years ago, I was in municipal court for a speeding ticket (52 in a 35). As I sat there were at least 20 DUI's being prosecuted that night. About five of them were illegal immigrants who needed interpreters to understand the proceedings.

I couldn't believe my ears as the magistrate just went from one to another and said $500.00 three days in jail plus court costs ($110.00). It didn't matter if you blew a .04 parked in your driveway or if you blew a .29 parked in someone's bedroom, it was clear to me that it had less to do with getting drunk drivers off the streets and more about keeping that cash register humming........

Of course by even mentioning it, I will be perceived by some as soft on drunk drivers. Which is how law enforcement extracts it's money from the public.............

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.

Read the rest..........