i have witnessed 100% sober drivers, blowing zero on a breathalyzer being arrested because the cops felt like it. anyone else failing so hard at their jobs would be fired, and these people are supposed to be trusted with extra responsibilities and human killing devices.
acab
Were those people black by chance?
nope, not in my case. they were butt-hurt because a bunch of designated drivers were picking up drunk people
Well their quota was bust if no one was drunk driving. They would have to work harder.
Portable breathalyzers are notoriously unreliable and it’s definitely possible for them to indicate zero on someone that is drunk. And also the other way around, which is why the tests always have to repeated with a stationary breathalyzer or a blood sample to be used as evidence in court.
That being said, it’s still not acceptable for cops to arrest people without probable cause
Dogs are also as accurate as a coin toss. Essentially, it all comes down to what the officer thinks and their personal motivations, which is terrifying.
Man I hope you show this comment when you’re in need of help.
‘just wait til you need a bully with a human killing device’ shouldnt be something anyone has to say
I’ve got my own actually. Cops won’t be there for me, but I will be.
Alright kiddo
im sure youve witnessed good cops ignore bad cops, right? so the general public cant tell which is which, youve had that front seat?
ill bet youre all for licensing, insuring them and holding them accountable when they completely fail their jobs, right? ending qualified immunity is a good start, right?
its amazing the bullshit you witness when you work for and with them.
Yeah, I was never a blue line guy, they are the government, so I can’t just assume they are my buddy, or working for my personal benefit. However, after years of working in a career where I had to interact with police, from all over the place, I now hate police. They see the general public as the enemy, and you should see them the way they see you.
Dude for real - if this dude ends up being the victim of a home invasion who the hell is he going to call to show up 8 hours later to interrogate him like he was the culprit and probably shoot his dog for some reason?
Man I’m sure they’ll be really sad when no one shows up to shoot their dog
I totally believe police sincerely think they can tell based on experience, but it’s false confidence.
Story time: One night on my way home I was pulled over for a broken taillight, which I truthfully told the officer I wasn’t aware of. After taking another look she gave me a warning but said, with a little lilt in her voice, “Lotta dust in there, looks like it’s been broken for a while… surprised you haven’t noticed it.” As if she “knew” I was lying, because cops have heard it all before.
I really wanted to unload on her that I was on my way home from working at my job and then taking my shift sitting in the hospital room keeping my 10-year-old daughter company until she fell asleep. She had been undergoing cancer treatments for the last 2 months. So excuse the hell outta me but there were a lot of things I’d missed lately. Like Thanksgiving. And Christmas. And apparently a broken taillight. I’ll get to it when I get to it but I can’t make any promises.
That smirky little accusing tone of voice still sticks with me after 20 years. So fuck your smug-ass attitude, Officer I Know What I Know, because no you sure as fucking hell didn’t.
Officer threatened to slam my dad on the ground in front of us all for telling him politely to have a nice day.
Officer screamed at us in high school when we called for help because someone was beating up our friend then did nothing.
Officer pulled me out of my car, threw me over the his, wrenched my hands up behind my back… Because my registration was out of date.
Bad people shouldn’t be in positions of power. Why aren’t we protected from this? We’re being abused and no one is stopping it. I want to send a message somehow.
Not sure what send a message means, but for people who want do more than just complain online many communities have citizen oversight committees. There’s a National Association for Citizen Oversight of Law Enforcement that provides guidance - https://www.nacole.org/
Field sobriety tests are about as accurate as Tarot readings.
In most jurisdictions, the police can arrest you for refusing. Some experts say that if you’re sober, it’s better to refuse and be arrested, and then find it in court.
Refusing a breathalyzer is expensive though thanks to implied consent. The ticket for that is a ton of points.
If you’re sober you should absolutely agree to the breathalyzer and the blood test.
It’s the field tests that are bogus.
What? You have to pay for the blood test if you refuse the breath analyzer? Everyday I learn something new about the US and everyday I’m shocked about it.
Not sure if you have to pay for the blood test (it wouldn’t surprise me), but part of driving on a public road is consenting to a breathalyzer test. They do need a warrant to draw your blood against your will, but they may bully the hospital into doing it anyway. Refusing to take one is a crime that in combination with any other violation can get your license suspended.
It may be worth going that route if you are marginally over the limit and a few hours would sober you up.
If I refuse a field sobriety test and request s breathalyzer or blood test instead, would I still be arrested?
Yep. Defy a cop in any way and you’ll likely be arrested. You might even be charged with resisting arrest.
I mean, so can I in a sense – guys passed out on my couch. “Yup, he’s too high to drive.”
In seriousness, I wish they’d just bust people driving recklessly. It’s almost every day now that I’m almost side swiped by an aggressive muscle car driver; it’s driving me crazy. I don’t care what they’re on, alcohol, cocaine, meth, or just pure uncut Machismo, I need those people fucking jailed before it’s my kid on the news about getting hit and run’d.
We as a society must have a solution which is not the police solving every fucking inconvenience. They are literally killing us in our own homes. Please do the difficult mental work of figuring out a better solution than “call the cops”. I know it’s convenient but our overreliance on it has resulted in one the greatest incarceration crisis of our lifetime. I know you’re angry but please start thinking of other ways to solve problems.
Odd for you to call vehicular manslaughter an inconvenience, but let’s be clear: you can both reduce police involvement where it is not needed (such as mental health crisis) while still maintaining some order for actual dangerous offenders. You can also approach a problem from multiple angles, such as making prisons more about rehabilitation than punishment, or addressing future crime by investing in education and family welfare.
None of that means you also can’t address a very local problem of 40,000 annual hit and runs with 8,000 deaths. Living in South LA, you literally see street take overs at least once a week usually with stolen cars. Doing two things at once- that is, addressing the current problems while also preventing future ones- shouldn’t be difficult for someone “doing the mental work” like yourself.
How many of those 40,000 hit and runs with 8000 deaths were prevented by police officers?
Your strategy doesn’t work.
If police and prisons made us safer, we’d be the safest country on the planet. We’re not. Police hurt people after a crime has been committed, not before. Your strategy does. not. work.
That’s the point of police reform. They weren’t prevented because reckless driving isn’t enforced here. The police here suck, and have always sucked, and should be replaced and reformed.
Now, if you’re done misconstruing my argument to fit your virtue signaling, why don’t you say the solution to hit and run drivers, and while you’re at it, street take overs?
I’m not working signaling because I never hear anyone say this: The police should be fully abolished, the prisons should be emptied, and the judicial system should be forced to find a way to solve societal problems without them. This is because they are a for-profit, corrupt, wildly inhumane and ineffective system that has resulted in generations of Americans losing their lives behind bars for harmless crimes.
You keep bringing up reckless driving, but the majority people in jail aren’t there for vehicle offenses. They’re mostly kids who got caught with marijuana. Do you really want a wildly racist institution, which takes away people’s freedom for profit to continue to operate just because you’re inconvenienced by other people driving?
Stop being selfish. The problem affects more than just you.
They keep bringing up reckless driving because that was the thesis of their original comment. They’re concerned about reckless driving because it results in violence, bodily harm, and death in their community.
You came stomping in here about police reform and the disproportionate rate of incarceration for non-violent offenders. And while those criticisms are valid, they’re misplaced here.
Further arguing the point is demeaning to everyone involved
I would argue they are perfectly placed, not misplaced.
My counter argument is that injury and death caused by reckless driving is not solved by the police. And worse, the prison crisis is doing great harm to our society, mostly to people of color.
I was countering what that person said, and you think it’s misplaced? I think what you mean is it’s not convenient to you. Seems to be a trend.
Get rid of stops for small shit like expired tabs or dim taillights so traffic cops can focus on unsafe driving. John Oliver did a pretty good piece on this recently.
Actual reckless driving needs to be enforced though. It needs to be something you go to jail for, your car gets towed, and you can’t drive again until the fine is paid, and you take Driver’s Ed. There are people out here doing 20+ mph faster than everyone else and weaving through the merge lane and shoulder because the HOV lane and farthest travel lane are flowing at 80 and that’s just too slow for them. This is not, “every fucking inconvenience”. These people are driving like they’re the object of a police chase already and police aren’t allowed to do it anymore because it’s so dangerous to other people on the road.
So while I get you don’t like the police, I’m not sure how else you’re going to stop McFuckStick from swiping that family of four into the back of a semi truck.
You aren’t wrong but the overincarceration is largely sentence lengths not arrest rates
ah yes, the police. the people with a reputation for always properly assessing every situation
Nobody (especially pharmaceutical corporations) ever wants to talk about prescription mind altering medications and how normalized its become to be heavily medicated and still drive a vehicle on the highway. I’ve run into people in public at grocery stores and restaurants who obviously have had way too much medication and are literal zombies or wide eyed freaks then get into a car and drive away.
This isn’t shaming anyone for taking medication. It’s a good thing in the right circumstances but if someone has taken so much that it affects their ability to react to things quickly while operating a vehicle, it’s definitely something to worry about. It’s something I think about all the time when I’m driving down a public highway anywhere.
Mfers put me on gabapentin for my then undiagnosed scoliosis, the plan was to ramp me up to “hopefully” null my pain. I went into a irrational panic that I had rabies, among other things, and certainly shouldn’t drive when my eyes wouldn’t stay still. I got myself into physical therapy and that turned out to be all I needed.
Wow I’m really glad I had heard stories about that stuff in the past. I had to see specialists for back problems and they offered that drug, and I said no thanks, and physical therapy did the trick for me also. I feel like I end up turning down half the drugs the doctors offer me in recent years.
I sometimes feel like I toe the line in conversation of being anti-medication but that is not my intention ever.
However, with testament of my mother who has worked at a number of hospitals, there are shit doctors. She keeps a list of doctors she’s assisted that she would never want to be worked on by, and that’s really freaky to me. Its a slippery slope to think you know better than doctors as a whole… but with some doctors you just may, and it really may save you a lot of suffering.
This is a big reason why I don’t want to be put on anti-anxiety medications (e.g. SSRIs), because I’m concerned about how they would affect my driving. I drive in fairly taxing conditions, so alertness is very important.
The problem is there is no legal threshold for marijuana like there is for alcohol. If they think you are at all intoxicated they will take you in. Never admit to a cop that you have ingested marijuana in any capacity if you are pulled over.
Also, don’t lie about it. Just respectfully refuse to answer any questions about it.
Or just don’t drive high
Police will surely never harass you if you’re not actually doing anything wrong /s
That’s my point though? Making the decision to drive under the influence and getting stopped by the police are completely separate events. And you only have control over one of them.
Whoosh
But this thread is about bashing the police, not about being a responsible adult!
Having trouble following along? Just read slower, maybe comment less
Yeah, my bad, it’s lemmy world. I really need to stop stumbling into this cesspool.
Marijuana stays in your systen for a very long time since it is a fat soluable drug, so even if you smoked 2 days ago and you’re stone-cold sober, you will still test positive for THC.
Well actually those are metabolites of cannabinoids, not active cannabinoids themselves. Alcohol too has metabolites in the body we could test for, which would show up a few days after drinking.
But yeah the tests all test for metabolites which can show up literally months after smoking for heavy users. But technically we could test the blood for active cannabinoids. I just don’t know how feasible that is to achieve in quicktesting of any sort. And since you can build a huge tolerance to weed, that wouldn’t tell us a lot either. With alcohol, you can’t really build a tolerance. The difference in the amount heavy users can consume without seemingly being impaired compared to a novice user who almost drops from a single hit versus the difference in how much alcohol a proper career alcoholic compared to a teenager could? Snoop Dogg could outsmoke most people, but even the most experienced alcoholics wouldn’t really have an edge against other people. It’s purely the size which matters at that point, really, the bigger the person and the more fat they have, the more booze they’ll be able to take.
You’re incredibly wrong about alcohol tolerance. When I was a massive alcoholic I drank roughly a liter of vodka every day. It took me about a half liter to be about to function as a human. If you talked to me after half a liter you would have no idea if it weren’t for the smell.
These days I drink once or twice a week, if at all. If I drank half a liter of liquor I would be fucking blackout shitfaced.
Yeah, but you were still drunk. You would get physically about as impaired as the regular person. Not equally as, because there’s certain parts you get accustomed to. But more or less.
The lethal dose would be roughly the same. You would be able to drink more, and stay conscious longer despite the impairment, but you would be impaired.
I’m Finnish and from a small town and I definitely know alcoholics. My third cousins and their father have an insane “tolerance” to alcohol, insofar that they can get incredibly drunk. They don’t have a tolerance in the sense that they consume several times more potent alcohol several times more than me at a faster rate without being as impaired.
If you talked to me after half a liter you would have no idea if it weren’t for the smell.
I believe this is true for most people, but I would know. I know I’m tooting my own horn on an pseudonymous forum, but having driven a taxi in Finland for years and being pretty perceptive in general, I would know. But I do believe you that most wouldn’t know. However, you would have an impaired reaction time, you’d have an impaired balance, etc etc.
With weed, there’s a huge difference, and people who have bad experiences generally just had a very strong experience, because someone who’s a regular smoker gave them a hit, and since monkey see monkey do, they took roughly a similar hit, thinking “one can’t hurt, he’s taken several”, and then ended up being silly high and feeling even feeling nauseous (a lot of the people in my generation tried weed first time when drunk, which is an even worse idea, as alcohol in your blood actually makes you more high, affecting how liver handles cannabinoids, albeit very lightly).
So yeah I am generalising, alcohol does have a tolerance, but compared to weed, it’s really non-existent. I can smoke a huge bowl and I won’t even get puffy red eyes. If some of my non-smoker friends are even in the same room, they get lazy for the rest of the evening, and if they take a hit, I won’t let them take a large one. With alcohol, no matter how experienced you are, people still drink fairly similarly sized drinks of roughly the same strength. You don’t see people chugging four bottles of whisky glass after glass in a party of a few hours and then walk out of there, you know?
I think we have different definitions of tolerance. I enjoy the insight into your Finnish life. I’m US. My grandparents hosted a Finn on foreign exchange while my mom was in university. Even as a child I remember they would exchange letters and talk about her.
I don’t want to argue, I just want to say that weed and alcohol is a wonderful combination. It’s just too bad people decide to try it while drunk. Recipe for a bad night.
Don’t drive and stay in the basement.
Not sure why this is downvoted and honestly really fucking hate how smokers get a pass on this tolerance bs.
Don’t get high and drive. Don’t drink and drive. There is absolutely no grey area. Not because of interactions with police but because you could fucking kill someone.
So because I’ve consumed a legal substance I’m no longer able to drive a car ever again? What are you on about
You’re kind of missing the point. You’re correct on principle but the issue is how to actually regulate it and create laws around it. Im totally in favor of media campaigns with that point, it is a north star. Thats what they actually do in California. Still, someone can be .02 BAC and be be fine to drive. I’m sure there’s some alcoholics that can be over .08 and pass a coordination test, due to their tolerance. The .08 is the law for a good reason though.
The only way to do that for thc would be a blood test, to the best of my knowledge. I don’t think that’s practical. The answer is definitely NOT police discretion though.
reminds me of STFU Friday!
I got maybe a third of the way through the article and had to stop due to rage at the police. Again.
The police are legally allowed to lie about everything not under oath or not to another public servant. It is one reason to never bother with their polygraph. They lie about the results, and then act like their lie is proof.
They lie to the press all the time about officers names, ages, and whereabouts. It is their reflex to just lie and worry about it later.
Even breathalyzer are less reliable than the police would dare admit.
I really wonder what a rebooted from scratch ethical police force would look like. A force with honor and integrity and all those words they print on the side of the cars. A respected, well-paid job.
You know, something like what they show on every TV program airing on CBS, but real.
The UK is a lot closer to that (though still has its issues). One of the main differences is the base mentality. America is “police by force”, the UK is “police by consent”. Our normal police don’t even carry guns. The mentality change this creates is huge. They default to trying to deescalate things, and dealing with things calmly. This makes people a lot more responsive to their orders, when required.
Though to note, our officers aren’t push overs. Most are fully capable of controlling someone aggressive. We also have armed response. Any mention of a gun involved, and they come in armed and trained to the teeth. We also have a mandatory minimum sentence of 5 years for an illegal firearm.
I think American culture is much more adversarial (on a personal level) than many other nations. We’re hyper-competitive and more about domination than cooperation.
It’s tricky, since you have inherent power imbalances and the jobs dangerous on top of that. I think you can look at Japans older model where they basically just have a pen and paper and chill out in kobans (corner police boxes) to just help people with directions and any disorders. Less heroic TV types and more glorified public assistants.
Would never fly here, but police are adorable in Japan.
It would be full of women, not men. The police have helped domestic abusers and rapists and murderers of women for decades. In fact, a lot of the police force is made of men who have done those exact crimes.
Just like if the medical system were just, doctors would have disabilities. As it is, almost no person with a disability can really make it through med school and residency to become a doctor.
This is the essence of why representation matters, and why one big powerful group shouldn’t have total power over another group.
Except if you refuse a breathalyzer, you are presumed guilty, not innocent.
Where I live, you can refuse a breathalyzer, but then you’re taken to a blood test. If you were just on the edge on the limit, it might be worth it, because it takes a while to go to the blood tests so unless you’ve just had a drink, you’ll have time to metabolise a bit.
Who does the blood draw though, police officers? I wouldn’t really trust them near veins.
They’ll take you to the nearest healthcare center / ER basically.
Nowadays most don’t really demand that right, as there’s “accuracy breathalysers”, which are acceptable as evidence, so usually you’ll just use one of those at a police station or the back of some police vans. I’m unsure whether you can still refuse those for a blood test though.
But yeah no the police aren’t allowed to draw the blood, that’s for sure.
One of the biggest culture shocks as a Danish person visiting California, was seeing how normalised driving high was. I smoke pretty regularly, but I would never even think about getting behind the wheel after a single puff.
I agree with you people shouldn’t, but this is about our police being able to do whatever they want and ruining lives purely based on their intuition, which is frequently wrong and unriable at best.
Just keep a MAGA hat under your seat and throw it on when you get pulled over.
Ah yes, because police love when people start reaching for objects under car seats
Okay. Center console
Sir, your skin is too dark to drive
I’ve only been too high to drive once. And you know what? I didn’t drive. I was too high.
These the same cops that mag dump because of an acorn? The same cops that “OD” if fentanyl is in the same hemisphere as themselves? The cops that lost a rifle while “raiding” an “illegal” “grow op”? Those cops?
(X)
Cobb County Police in Georgia got some bad press for this a few years back. An officer took a weekend course to certify he could tell when people were drunk or high, and then he ruined a bunch of innocent people’s lives.
TIL police have a big enough god complex they think they are doctors with no training.
You just learned that today?
