It works fine in other parts of the world, including here. If you blow 0.0, you can go (drive on). And everyone, including the police, are OK with it.
Oh, and the police also sometimes have roadblocks where they stop all cars, and all drivers have to do breathalyser tests. If you blow clean, you can go. If not, you are taken in for an extended test, and can not go. And btw., here the blood alcohol limit is 0.02%, and it is strictly enforced. Fines are calculated based on income, at 1.5 times monthly gross income. You will lose your driver’s license for at least 12 months, and with a blood alcohol content above 0.05% there will also be some jail time.
Politicians here are reluctant to pass harsher drunk driving penalties because they themselves don’t want to get ensnared by these laws.
You hear news stories all the time in the U.S. about drunk drivers who finally kill someone after having 5-10 previous drunk driving arrests. IMO, anyone with more than one, or perhaps two, prior DUI convictions should have their license revoked for life.
Here: If you get another conviction for DUI within 5 years, you risk losing your driver’s license permanently. Or if the consequences of your DUIing are serious, e.g. if you run over and kill someone.
the problem here is typically you have already been arrested, had your car towed and impounded, and been taken to the jail before you ever get to a breathalyzer. So when you blow 0.0% they are basically required to push false charges against you for other crimes, to protect themselves legally (if you get convicted of ANYTHING stemming from a police encounter, you can’t really challenge anything that happened). They like to use charges like reckless driving in those situations.
Without the false charges, they might be on the hook for having your car towed or lawsuits from false arrest/imprisonment;officers are judged on their contribution to the local governments bottom line. Having a driver switch from pay the state, to being reimbursed by the state, is not good for their career.
Do they think their work is a penis-size competition? If incompetence is the problem, they need more and better training in order to not fuck up. And to avoid false DUI charges that they need to cover up, they certainly seem to need hand-held breathalysers to save their asses. And if they falsely arrest people for imagined DUI because of their own incompetence, then they certainly do not rectify their incompetence or impressions by adding false charges. That’s just plainly authoritarian horsecockery. “I fuck up your life because I can and because I enjoy it”.
I’m not claiming that our police is perfect, as they manage to do their own cock-ups and have their own biases perfectly fine. But by and large they don’t tend to invent charges because they cannot stand having their initial assumptions being proven wrong. And there are no financial incentives for the police departments to press charges and fine people. After all, they have at least three years of college (bachelor or master degrees in policing) on their backs, so one would think this training prepares them for what they will meet in their service. And that they learn to better avoid cockups.
Yep, same here in Aus, we even have “Booze Buses” that go with the organised stops where drivers that fail the hand held are interviewed, tested on the static device and if very drunk license suspended that minute.
In all cases over 0.08% the car is either parked or towed, the driver arrested and will spend the night in the lock up.
Probationary drivers have zero tolerance…
Subsequent convictions result in longer driving bans, much higher fines (tens of thousands) can include jail terms.
Aussies take the drunk driver very seriously indeed…except the perpetrators themselves who FAFO…
The best way to understand the police in the US is that they are generally corrupt and not really interested in justice. It’s telling that they can’t bring themselves to arrest the masked goons known as ICE despite watching them commit atrocities and brutalize people. A couple of police chiefs (Minneapolis and, IIRC, Baltimore) talk a good game but I have yet to see ICE treated by so-called law enforcement as the masked, unidentified street thugs that they are. The regime complains bitterly about the slightest setback and I’ve never heard them complain about their agents ending up in jail for how they conduct their work.
Police here also aren’t well trained in things like de-escalation and dealing with mental health issues, and “community policing” is the exception, not the norm. They can’t handle being challenged, especially by anyone non-white or non-conformist. They are basically all about maintaining control and when they lose control they tend to shoot you – even in the back, for the crime of running away. They have to do something pretty egregiously wrong that’s captured on film to experience any sort of accountability. And even then it can be dicey.
The county sheriff where I live was eager to use a new robot to breach a home in which a mentally disturbed man had barricaded himself. His wife’s pleas to be allowed to talk to him first fell upon deaf ears. They ended up destroying the house structurally, and the guy shot himself.
Other small police departments in this part of New York have obtained surplus military equipment such as armored personnel carriers. It is all about brute force. I don’t think they could imagine the norm where police don’t typically even carry weapons, which I understand to be the case in many Western democracies.
Police in the U. S. Are becoming increasingly militarized. Cops years ago carried a revolver and a set of handcuffs and that was about it. Now they dress in full tactical getups with enough ordinance to single-handedly invade Poland.
The federal government has a program (the 1033 program) that gives surplus military equipment, like armored personnel carriers, to local police departments, and these departments don’t hesitate to use their new toys.
Our cops have no obligation to protect anyone—that was a Supreme Court ruling a few years ago—but they are quick to use force and violence against the most vulnerable in our society. When faced with a real threat, like the Uvalde school shooting, their number one priority is “officer safety”.
And this is just garden-variety bad design (depends on single point of failure internet-based system), not Robo-Taxi / “full” self-driving level of hopeful design.
I often speculate that perhaps part of the problem is that the profession that hands out traffic/parking infractions, shouldn’t be the same profession that gets sent to shoot bank robbers.
A more fundamental problem is perhaps that the municipals, police departments, etc. rely on the income from the fines. Thus, they have a financial incentive to give people as many fines as possible, asshole style.
They also should not handle domestic disputes, wellness checks or mental health interventions. They have shot far too many people in mental health crises or even just with severe disabilities for “not complying”. They tend to go apeshit when their authority is challenged or their ego bruised. They usually have little to no training in “community policing”.
One of the reasons they can’t bring themselves to arrest masked thugs from ICE is that there is too much resonance with their own techniques. Some of them are just ICE minus masks and plus some training in civil rights (at least for white people).
They also tend to prefer to assert their authority over relatively helpless individuals rather than someone who can fight back. A perfect example of this is their response to the school shooting in Uvalde.
Who is the bored guy pacing back & forth in the background reading something and carrying – what – a towel draped over one arm? Seems like a character from Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It’s a failure of stage management to have that going on while she’s supposed to be channeling the spirit of God. It just replaces the ginned-up awe with a sense of the absurd.
As for Paula, this kind of crazy is common in Pentecostal circles but she’s even less convincing than the usual specimens.
I know Trump has fastened onto her but it’s probably because (1) she figured out how to flatter him and (2) she probably looks fuckable to him.
