Sure, that's honest. They should say that.

An honest introduction to a dishonest practice.

How about this: "Hello, I'm Hillary Clinton. I'm going to take all your guns away, and claim it's 'for the children.' But, I really don't like guns for no apparent reason. So they must go."

As I mentioned earlier, I rode with an officer who said essentially that. I was given the explanation that it was a PR move - people he pulled over frequently commented they were glad to see the officer out looking for drunk drivers.

Well the drunks didn't say that, but you get the idea.

It's clear there a several folks here who don't like the current approach law enforcement uses to catch drunk drivers. Does anyone have any alternative methods they'd like to see tried?

As for the original thread, I too am surprised an officer couldn't manage two measly traffic stops per day. I once heard about an officer who didn't like doing traffic stops at night because she was frightened about approaching vehicles in the dark. I'm not sure how darkness at night was a big surprise, I guess eventually she got on the right track. I bet when it was 20 below a while back, there were a lot of officers that were suddenly two busy to pull cars over.

Lastly, I want to make it clear that there is nobody's opinion on in this forum I respect more than Mr. Unger's. I'm not trying to start any flamewars or attack anyone. I'm just trying to understand conclusions that I didn't reach myself.

Sure. Obey the Constitution's original meaning, not the abomination that is Terry. Pull over people for actual violations, not pretexts.

I guess we'd have to define what an "actual violation" constitutes versus the violations officers currently use.


EDIT: Hang on, I think I misunderstood Andrew. I think we're back to not pulling people over for a non-DUI violation and then during the stop finding a DUI. I don't have a problem with that, but I respect the fact that several of you do.

When we look for drunks, why not actually, well, look for drunks. Impaired drivers show up with a little observation. Stop them for that. I have no problem arresting drunks they accidently find, of course, that's what to do.

But don't find them "accidently on purpose".

I don't know if DUI arrests would go down or not. We are down to about 200 deaths/year involving alcohol in MN now. If half of those deaths would happen even if drivers were sober, it's 100 deaths per year. We're probably getting diminishing returns for our 45,000 DUI arrests.

I've heard that only 1% of drivers are drunk, so we must have 4,500,000 stops a year. That's a lot of innocent people hasseled and expense to try to cut the number of avoidable DUI deaths below 100.

My numbers are probably off a bit, but my point is that we are over- reacting by denying everyone their rights because of the remaining drunk
drivers. If we follow the Constitution, the sky won't fall.