Don't Drive Drunk on Saturday, in South KC
It will probably be a great Saturday evening for getting your drink on and cruising the roads of Kansas City north of 75th Street, because the Police Department has announced it will be running a DUI checkpoint in South Kansas City, starting at 11.
What does this mean to you? If you drive in South Kansas City, it means you may be accosted by the police without any individualized suspicion of wrongful behavior. If you live elsewhere in Kansas City, you may face blackouts of police coverage, since dozens of officers will be spending hundreds of man-hours to arrest a few buzzed drivers. If you pay taxes in Kansas City, you will simply have your tax dollars wasted in an effort that is more about misguided PR ("We're a police state, and we can interfere with you whenever and wherever we like" being the PR message) than about saving lives.
If, by chance, you or a loved one is killed because some drunk moron blows through a red light, well, the police will respond to the scene when they get around to it. They'll be busy delivering a PR message in South Kansas City.
Labels: government waste, kansas city, police
posted by Dan at 7/17/2008 07:29:00 AM
6 Comments:
Dan - on this we agree. This kind of DUI checkpoints are indeed warrantless stops without any valid cause or individualized reasonable suspicion, and should be abolished.
And this comes from a 10 year prosecutor, BTW.
Whether they are effective at their intended goal; that is, reducing drunk driving and/or catching drunk drivers, I don't know. Frankly, I don't care. The Constitution demands limitations on police, even though the price of some of those limitations means less efficient law enforcement.
It is the cost of a society where a man's home is his castle, and he is entitled to be left alone.
In complete agreement. Although I am absolutely against drinking and driving, I think saturation patrols do a much more efficient job of getting offenders off the street than just stopping every single person who happens to drive by a particular geographic point.
These "checkpoints" strike me as being a bit too much like what you would expect in a fascist police state where the gestapo accost anybody at anytime and demand to see "your papers".
The end does not justify the means.
Almost enough to make me want to run up to Walgreens' (just south of the old county line on Wornall) and knock back some Tuacca while doing figure 8s on my scooter and replaying ancient, drunken brawls with Mirabile and son...
I mean, if all the police are going to be busy just to the north of me, why the heck not? It will be a lot like old times.
Dan, we agree. They should also check people for prescription drugs, sleep deprivation, texting and anything else that impairs driving. Or they could do it the old fashioned way...throw the book at someone when they have actually broken the law
And there will be strip searches by the side of the road! I got a whole tube of hand cream to help with the supervision.
Does anyone recall the DUI patrol vans? I think they had much greater success, probably due in large part to actually driving the roads looking out for people swerving and driving drunk. These check points are nothing more than posturing and totally ineffective.
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