This last weekend my wife and I went to a Christmas party, and on the way to drop off the little one, we passed the DUI checkpoint on Kietzke. It was 6:30 PM, and the line of delayed cars stretched for blocks. Anyone turning around was pulled over for evading the checkpoint, which is a crime in and of itself in Nevada.
On our way home sometime after midnight, when we (and plenty of other people) would have been far more likely to be DUI, there was nothing. So what was the point?
According to the RGJ, police stopped and delayed 1,843 Americans from going about their business that night. Of those, they arrested 9 for DUI. That’s 0.48% of all people stopped in the six hours they were there. About 205 people were needlessly stopped for every misdemeanor arrest they actually made.
What a ridiculous waste of time, money, and lost liberty.
The wrongly decided Supreme Court case upholding these checkpoints will forever mar my admiration for Justices Rhenquist and Scalia. But just because the courts have said something is legal doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea.
The article doesn’t say how many officers were involved, but we saw quite a few. What it does note is that four different law enforcement agencies were involved. Four! One wonders how much overtime was paid.
The vast majority of DUI arrests occur when an officer pulls someone over for a traffic infraction, and usually then after seeing a driving pattern that suggests to their cop intuition that the driver might be somewhat… altered. (I’ve reviewed hundreds upon hundreds of police reports from DUI arrests.) Good – that’s how it should be. But while the officers are cruising the streets, they’re doing much more – looking for accidents, available to respond quickly to reports of crimes in progress, and perhaps most importantly, simply “showing the flag” so the community (the good guys along with the bad) knows law enforcement is paying attention. The flip side is that when they’re in a checkpoint, they AREN’T doing any of those necessary things, and that hurts the community.
I WANT officers out and about, instead of chained to an easily avoidable checkpoint. (Ask the French how well fixed fortifications work out in the end…) There’s even an app for that!
And why did they stop at 11:00? Why were they so far from down town on the night of the big Santa Pub Crawl? If they’re serious about catching DUI, why didn’t they pay better attention to both the where and the when that this particular crime typically takes place?
I would bet a lot of money that had the resources spent on the checkpoint been allocated to extra, regularly conducted patrols with cops on the streets looking for bad driving, and had they been done from 9:00 PM – 3:00 AM, the results would have been far better. If we have to have these checkpoints, can’t we at least do them in a way that nets some kind of benefit?
I sometimes hear that we shouldn’t worry about the cost, because we get federal grant money to pay for the checkpoint. I don’t know if that was the case here, but who cares? As if we aren’t paying for that grant money through our taxes in the first place. And again, wouldn’t grant money be better spent on regular patrols in the middle of the night instead of when most people are sitting down to their supper?
We are often faced with choices between liberty and public safety. Sometimes those dilemmas are real, but all too often they’re complete nonsense. Not only does paying attention to citizens’ liberty carry its own intrinsic worth, but most of the time it makes far better public safety policy. In this case, not only did we annoy and waste the time of hundreds of citizens, we made it less likely drunk drivers that night would actually be caught.
I work with various members of our local law enforcement community, and for the vast majority of them, I have the greatest respect. But this weekend’s checkpoint was simply dumb policy. It’s long past time to rid our community of these expensive, ineffective, and dubiously Constitutional checkpoints.
