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The goal, she said, was to detain drunks before they leave a bar and go do something dangerous like drive a car.
Pre-Crime strikes again.
I have said this a thousand times, the people that write laws are, for the most part, idiots. They are reactionary in their law making and poor in the choice of verbage in the law, which makes it easy for the law to be abused/mis-applied. I doubt that the intent of the laws for public intoxication were to arrest people drunk in a bar. Nor was it intended, I suspect, to arrest someone for what they might do upon leaving the bar. I suspect it was intended to keep people from passing out on street corners, thusly making the town an undesireable place to work/live/shop. But, in this puritan and extremist world we are now living in what are you going to do. Now, if these people were creating a nuisance, they should have been arrested for that rather than the public intoxication.
In that town I live in, a ten year old was arrested for riding his bike uptown last year. I'm sure that law was written to prevent skateboarders (I have nothing against them al long as they're curtious) from hanging out infront of businesses and creating a nuisance uptown. But, the way the law was written it was illegal to be on a bike or a skateboard anywhere in the downtown area. He was going uptown to pick up something from the store for his dad, and he got arrested (hand cuffed and driven to the police station in the back of a squad car). The police are not paid to interpret the laws, they are paid to enforce them. But, it does tend to clog up our legal system if people are being arrested for things like this.
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I feel sorry for people who don't drink. When they wake up in the morning, that's as good as they're going to feel all day.
-Frank Sinatra
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