Happy New Year to all of our dear readers. Please be safe this evening. I would recommend not driving after midnight to maximize your safety. Stay where you are until the sun comes up. But the danger you should be most concerned about is not drunk drivers, but the police. Even being a designated driver is very risky and I offer this excerpt from an excellent essay entitled "The Tyranny of DUI Enforcement" as a warning to stay off the roads tonight:
But what about when overzealous enforcement of DUI laws does just the opposite of its stated goal of saving lives, and places innocent lives at risk? That’s just what happened on New Year’s Day, 2010, outside Mundelein, Illinois, when police stopped Jean Kotlinski on suspicion of DUI at about 3 am. Despite being the designated driver, and telling the officers as much, she was forced out of her car into the freezing, snowy weather to perform those ridiculous roadside gymnastics known as “field sobriety tests.” When, after passing those “tests” with flying colors, she was dragged to another cruiser to perform a breath test, her understandably concerned husband, Steven Kotlinksi got out of the passenger seat of their car to check on her. In typical fashion, the police completely overreacted, threatening him with their Tasers, and ordering him back in the car. Steven admits to being inebriated at the time, so perhaps his decision to argue with officers was a poor one influenced by a little too much liquid courage, his objection to his wife’s treatment was legitimate, and the officers were grossly excessive in their use of force. Despite warning them of her husband’s heart condition, police insisted “he’s gonna get Tased,” and so, even after he relented and returned to the front seat of the car, he was treated to a dose of electro-shock torture. The officer was absolutely not in any immediate danger, nor could he even pretend that he was, so the usual claims about “officer safey” simply do not apply here. In fact, he took the time to handcuff Jean and put her in the back of his patrol car, before returning to “deal with” Steven. He walked up to the car where Mr. Kotlowski was seated, belted in, and demanded he get out, saying “I’m only going to tell you once, get out of the car or I’m gonna take you out.” Of course he didn’t bother waiting for his intended victim to even try and comply, and after trying to pull him out of the car with the seat belt still engaged, the cop stepped back and fired his Taser at the father of two, while his children looked on in horror from the back seat. After being shocked 4 more times, even with the officer’s full knowledge of his victim’s heart condition, Steven Kotlowski is lucky to be alive, despite he and his wife doing everything we are told we should do with respect to celebrations where alcohol is imbibed. They had a designated driver who consumed no alcohol, and she was stopped, investigated, cuffed and stuffed, and her husband was brutally assaulted, all in the name of “keeping the roads safe.”
Remember that in the eyes of the police, we are all drunk drivers now.