The Glade 4.0

Wow, those cops really hate it when people question them. The guy didn't do anything wrong.

There is a difference between police officers and pigs -- the authorities in that video were pigs.

Hopefully they get fried like like one.

The commentator was a douchebag.

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Holy shitsnacks!

Seems to be many horror stories about the Georgia police.

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"Life isn't divided into genres. It's a horrifying, romantic, tragic, comical, science-fiction cowboy detective novel. You know, with a bit of pornography if you're lucky."
— Alan Moore

Wow, that's an utterly worthless video. Reminds me of Monte's video purporting to show contractors in Iraw machine gunning vehicles for fun, but which obscures their voices with music the whole time.

Let's see..

1) The commentator doesn't even know what state it is. At the beginning he says South Carolina, then the officers later say Georgia.

2) He claims that the guy "does surprisingly well" on the Gaze Nystagmus test (where the cop is holding up the pen) even though he clearly can't see the guy's eyes any better than we can and has no basis.

3) He claims the guy is doing just fine on the tests and claims the guy is passing with flying colors when the guy is wobbling all over the place on the walk-and-turn test, and trying to stall the lift one foot and count test by claiming he doesn't know which foot to lift when in fact it doesn't matter. The standardized instructions say that the subject may lift whichever foot they choose.

4) The guy is not "not doing anything wrong"; he's displaying passive resistance by refusing to comply with verbal commands. He's not being actively resistant or assaulting them, but he is using a form of resistance by not doing as he's told when they move to place him under arrest. It's possible that the TASER exceeds the guidance for thise, but force continuums are not ironclad; a person at a certian level of resistance but who cannot be made to comply with lesser force allows a certain amount of escalation to higher levels of force. There are obviously limits to this; you cannot shoot the guy for not putting his hands behind his back, but without seeing their policy it is impossible to know if they exceeded it or not, and even if we could it would almost certainly be a judgement call.

5) The video is heavily edited, clearly skipping portions, has music and commentator talking obscuring much of it, and the commentator's speech largely a lot of pronouncements of things he either can;t know or which are false.

In fact, when we get to the end he starts talking about America's foriegn policy. Evidently he really doesn't give a **** about this traffic stop; it's some wanker trying to justify his outrage at America in general by trying to claim there's some relationship between traffic stops and foriegn policy.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

He looks drunk watching the video of his test (volume off). I didn't watch to the tazer part, but if nothing else, that braking maneuver he did at the start of the video would warrant a reckless driving charge (not to mention doing more than 20 over the speed limit in SC). From my experience though, GA doesn't, or didn't, have this distinction in charge based upon speed difference. Maybe that's changed in the last couple decades.

It also interesting that the law in GA requires you to take the field sobriety test, unless that officer was lying, which will do bad things to their case. In SC, you can refuse, though it means your license is automatically suspended. The normal legal advice is to refuse to take the test if you have any doubt whatsoever you can pass it and fight the suspension later.

From what little I could hear of the officer over the commentator's yammering was that he was saying you are required to take the field test or have your license suspended, hich would be the same as SC.

In Ohio, you can refuse the field tests without getting your license suspended; it's the breathalyzer at the station (the one that's admissable in court) that you have to take or get your license suspended. That suspension is practically impossible to fight because it's part of the documentation you sign when you get your drivers' license. On the other hand, it still might be better than getting a DUI conviction.

In reality it only matters if you're not visibly impaired. If you're visibly impaired, the video will nail you even below the limit because the DUI and the Excess BAC are actually two separate charges (although you can only be convicted of one for any given incident). Occasionally you do run into someone that is just really susceptible to alcohol and get drunk way below the limit.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I believe it is similiar in SC, though the way I worded my post was not well crafted.

I am pretty sure you can refuse one of the 3 types of testing and request one of the others (field, breathalyzer, or blood test). You can also refuse to take any of them, but it results in immediate suspension of your license.

Or, you can be a minority state senator and refuse to exit the vehicle for 2+ hours, on the pretense you didn't trust the police and were waiting on an official to arrive to say it was ok.

I wish our country was not such that this line isn't a joke.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

If you can refuse any, its probably the field test. The blood, urine, breath, or blood plasma tests are all actual admissible evidence of BAC whereas field tests are simply demonstrative of impariment.



I'd love to know what this was all about.. oh wait, I do. In Ohio you have to breathalyze within 2 hours of the initial stop. Presumably its the same in other states because BAC behaves pretty much the same regrdless of where you live. This guy being a lawmake probably knew that if he held out long enough the breathalyzer would be worthless. They should have removed him from the car well before that.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

I really wish our DUI laws actually had some teeth in them.

That said, this thread make me think of my buddy Steve...

Such as?

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Lose your license for 6 months on the first offense.

Lose it forever on the second.

It was actually a female legislator, not male. I want to say it was in the mid '90s, but I'm not sure, and my quick search for the story didn't return any results older than 2005.

I can't even remember the lady's name, but pretty sure she didn't get re-elected.

The first isn't all that different from what we currently have. The second.. I'm not in favor of that. A lot of people get DUIs because they are alcoholics and what they really need is treatment. I'd be more in favor of a "lose it until you demonstrate you do not have a drinking problem or have managed to control it if you do". Losing your driver's license forever is a major impact on livelyhood, and thereby on families.

In reality, taking away people's license doesn't stop them from driving if they need to drive anyhow. If its a matter of not getting to workj and getting fired, ro not driving, ole boy is going to drive.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Well, then we disagree.

We are way too lenient on drunk driving in this country. And frankly I'm done having sympathy for someone who can't get their **** together on it. I've seen news reports of folks with multiple DUI's but they still have their license. I've even someone who was on their 14th DUI. When it gets that bad, there needs to be lots of jail time and mandatory detox.

Yup, not having a license is a big burden in this country. Time to go live near a bus line and figure it out.

I *might* be open to some method to get your license back, but it would only be after several years of proof that you've been able to successfully control your issues.

Not having people drive hurts the work force.

1. They're going to drive anyway.
2. You are seriously underestimating how easy it is to get behind the wheel with a 0.08 BAC, let alone the possibility of getting busted for DUI anyway even with a lower BAC than that. I would wager that pretty much everyone who drinks regularly has DUIed at least once, most just don't get caught. The rate of alcohol clearance is far too variable for you to predict with any degree of accuracy when you'll be "good" to drive.

If you want to go this route you might as well just make ignition interlocks required to be standard equipment on all cars. That would solve the problem easily without completely destroying people's lives. Seriously, this is America. With a few exceptions, unless you live in the poorest areas you can't even feed yourself without a car.

I don't disagree with you about people who are on their 14th DUI (which is impressive; the best one I ever arrested was a seventh offense). I disagree with you that after the second offense we should drop the hammer like that.

In many cases, there is mandatory jail time and detox. Felony DUI happens in Ohio when cause injury, or on your 5th or 6th offense depending on circumstances, and there is at leat one entire prison dedicated completely to drug and alcohol detox. That's where I was a corrections officer.

I think you're going a little too far with your proposed consequences. I don't disagree with the basic sentiment.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

1. sure, and if they do and get caught, then there needs to be jail time.

2. actually I'm not. For a 200lb. person to blow a .08, they need to do the following. Drink 3 beers in 1 hour, then drink another beer an hour for 3 hours. It takes a little effort to get there, and if you're actually paying attention to what you're consuming it's not hard to regulate.

Well, my thought with dropping the hammer is that they need a wake-up call. Slow incremental increases have shown that they don't work. Make it the second infraction, and then as I said maybe create some mechanism for them to re-earn the license back. But the key point here is that the onus must be on the individual to earn it back. Absolutely it will be a hardship on the person losing their license. It was also a hardship on my nephew who broke his leg, and the friends of the family who lost their infant baby when a drunk driver hit them head on. As I stated, I have zero sympathy.

1. There is nowhere near enough room in the jail for people who rive with suspended licenses. If you only mean people who drive with a license suspension for DUI then that might be workable, but in most places that is the worst suspension to violate and there already is at least some jail time.

I don't think you grasp just how many suspended drivers are out there though. Sometimes I think half this county hasn't a valid license.

2. Yes, if you're paying attention and know the basic charts you can have an idea of your BAC. However BAC gets far more public attention than it actually deserves. That's simply a point where we say "above this point its safe to assume one is too impaired to drive". However, its not uncommon for people to be impaired below that number, or to have realtively little impairment above it. Moe importantly, you have to know how quickly you're sobering up. Just because you stopped drinking 5 hours ago doesn't mean you're sober.

Don't focus too much on BAC. What's important, and what causes accidents is impariment. There's obviously strong correlation there, but its far from perfect.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

legally require anyone who gets a DUI to pay for (at their expense) a breathalizer-restrictor to their car ignition?

My sympathy is with your nephew and his family and I completely understand that viewpoint. However, I don't know quite how you're defining "working". By what standard have incremental increases "not worked?" What would be "working" to you, and is it realistically achieveable for a reasonable monetary cost, without unacceptable side efects?

I'm sure you understand that eradicating drunk driving is not likely to happen even with draconian measures.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

We already do that, just generally not on the first offense nor with enough consistency.

Besides they aren't all they're cracked up to be. People get others to blow for them.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."