Imagine that it's New Year's Eve and you're in a bar calmly enjoying the coming of the New Year. All of a sudden, out of the blue, a police officer pulls you outside, gives you a breathalyzer test and arrests you for public drunkenness. You weren't causing any trouble or acting drunk, you just had the misfortune of being selected by the cop. This isn't a scene from a futuristic movie where a totalitarian regime has taken over, but rather a recounting of several incidents that occurred involving legal-aged bar patrons this month in Northern Virginia ("When bad things happen to good intentions," The Washington Post, Jan. 9). Bar owners who complained to the police about these episodes were told that the officers were allowed to conduct these random tests whenever they felt it necessary. But these owners' complaints are well-founded. Police should not be able to go into bars and pull people out at random, and legislation must be passed to prohibit these actions.
It is understandable that the police would want to do everything in their power to stop drunk driving. Perhaps they figure that arresting people inside bars could be a step in that direction. After all, it is possible that those drinking inside could later start a car in the parking lot. The police officer walking into the bar has probably seen his fair share of alcohol-related injuries and fatalities, and believes that he may be saving lives by arresting those that are drunk before they even step out of the bar.
This reasoning, however, is flawed. The officers in Northern Virginia did not bother to ask those they pulled out if they were driving home that night or had other means of transportation, but rather chose people at random. It is completely unfair for someone who had arranged a ride home through a designated driver or a taxi to be arrested just because he had been drinking.
Although the officers may have had noble intentions of preventing drunk driving, their method of arbitrarily pulling out bar patrons will do little or nothing to curtail the problem of driving under the influence. An officer can probably test only a handful of people with a breathalyzer. Even with a large group of officers, it is doubtful that all the patrons at a bar on a busy night like New Year's Eve could be tested. Especially when considering the huge amount of bars in the Northern Virginia area, testing every person at a bar is virtually impossible. As long as every person, or at least a majority of patrons, is not tested, this measure is useless.
Perhaps the police are using emethod of random pullouts as a scare tactic. If so, it is a hugely ineffective one. At a crowded bar, only the people who know the person that gets pulled out and those in his vicinity will know what happened. And again, there are so many bars in the region that it would be doubtful that even a relevant percentage of the people who were out drinking that night would realize there were cops trying to arrest people while they were in a bar minding their own business.
In addition, the bar patrons that were arrested and taken to the police station to be processed were returned to the bar after the proceedings. If that person's designated driver had already left, the police put them in a situation where they had no ride back.
Even if someone had consumed enough alcohol to register as over the legal limit on a breathalyzer, there shouldn't be any criminal repercussions for such actions. Drinking is a person's prerogative. There is no law against drinking, although there are laws against being drunk in public and for driving under the influence.
The practice of pulling bar patrons out of bars and testing them for drunkenness should be illegal. This procedure does little or nothing to stop drunk driving. It only succeeds in ruining an arbitrarily selected person's night and giving him or her a criminal record.
Because current Virginia laws do not prohibit police officers from engaging in this activity, laws must be passed protecting the rights of bar patrons to drink in peace.
(Alex Rosemblat's column appears
Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at arosemblat@cavalierdaily.com.)
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