Busted for being Drunk.... in a bar
 

Texas busting drunks ... in bars
Seems rather like shooting fish in a barrel and takes the sport out of catching drunks to me.

A person does not have a constitutional right to be drunk, however, this law seems to me a way to prevent things that MIGHT happen rather than what actually does happen.

I'll be the first person in line to suggest a person be drawn and quartered for driving drunk, but being drunk in a bar, well, that might be annoying, but it hardly seems illegal... Yes, they might run into traffic, or scale a fence and drown in a swimming pool, but they also could just entertain the masses with their idiocy...

for you texas residents, what sayeth you... would this prevent you from going out and getting drunk... Will this law do any good at all?

Yea this sounds like they needed a new revenue stream.

I'm glad I'm not in Texas. Yeesh. I have a question...I'm familiar with public drunken laws (don't be drunk on the street), but are bars considered "public"? Aren't they the private property of the owner, and are thus private property? Maybe I'm way off base here, I dunno.

Yeah me too. That is shitty.

I always thought bars were private property as well...

"but i didn't want to be drunk in public. i wanted to be drunk in a bar..."

I'm thinking of the bar i went to in college...literally a stones throw from my apartment building. (we had many serious criteria in picking our location...namely bar proximity). And if we went elsewhere, we had a DD. The culture of drinking got changed, and most folks i know just don't DUI because it's a social stigma to do so.

Get serious about the people who get behind the wheel. But leave the rest of us alone.

what a bunch of bullshit.

this type of thing is exactly why cops get called pigs. if they do shit like this, they are pigs. plain and simple.

I had another stand up comic in mind, martinguerre.

"No. No smoking in bars now...and soon no drinking and no talking!"


I don't really think anybody should get in trouble for being drunk. Arrest them after they do something illegal after they get drunk, eh? But arresting someone for simply being drunk? Get the fuck outta here.

I'm going to assume, until evidence to the contrary surfaces otherwise, that the people being arrested are just way too fucking drunk to function. I doubt the cops want to arrest every person drinking, so they figure out where the line is. It's probably not too hard to figure out where that line is...does everyone in this thread actually get so drunk at a bar that they can't function?

there are lots of other reasons to remove people falling off their chairs drunk from public spaces than just to keep them from driving, in my opinion.

This also sounds like one of those laws that can be easily abused by being arbitrarily enforced .

Is a nearby bar is hurting your property values? Call the cops.

Going through a bitter custody battle with an ex spouse who drinks every Friday at the same bar? Call the cops.

A bunch of "those people" crowding out your favourite local? Call the cops.

Political Activists might disrupt the big event next week? Call the cops.

Granted these scenerios are pretty extreme and require shady authorities, but the scope of these laws allow for them and people can be petty.

This is happening in Texas? When I lived there, it was still legal to drink in the car and drive. That way you could drive all the way to a 'wet' county and return to your 'dry' county with a buzz on. From what I understand, a lot of teenagers died that way.

Pendulum swing, perhaps?

Because they are being forced enforce the law, doesn't make them pigs, they are doing their job. I'm sure the directive to arrest people comes from higher than Office Friendly on the street.

Yep.

The job of the police is to uphold the law, not to interpret it. That is what we have judges for.

Individual officers don't institute policy like this. If detectives are shifting time from robberies, drugs, etc, someone is directing them to do so, and at the expense of dealing with those other issues. If it's happening at the state level there's some weird politics going on.

Didn't Texas just get rid of their alcohol serving drive-through grocery stores in the last five years? This would be a very fast pendulum swing.

I'm still not sure how someone could be arrested for being drunk on private property. As far as I know, it's still legal for those over 21 years of age to be intoxicated on private grounds. Bars are not owned by a government (federal, state or local), therefore they are private property.

Yep. The Reuters quotes from Beck leave too much room for interpretation. In my experience these press releases are usually done in combination with highly visible enforcement events. They're meant to score political points, and possibly deter some perceived nuisance. Still, if they're really arresting people it'll only take one annoyed victim with funds for this to hit the fan.

I'm sure the undercover agents just love pulling this duty. :rolleyes:

Thank you willravel

I also have a problem with this... What constitutes drunk? Above the legal limit? Belligerent? Visibly intoxicated? Seems to me to be a pretty hard standard to uphold. Also, what about those who walk to the bar and get drunk with the intention of calling a cab/DD later? To many unknowns to fairly enforce, if you ask me this is just asking for trouble from officers on a power trip.

I honestly don't know. I moved out of Texas in 1992; thirteen years ago. Even so, I agree that the former democratic state of Texas has swung far right in a bit more than a decade. A very fast pendulum swing for an entire state, under any measure.

I really would like to know how bar owners/managers feel about this. After all, they are in the business of serving people liquor, and this is putting their patrons in a bad position. I mean really....who has the intention of going to a bar to remain completely sober unless they are the DD?

That's how things tend to go. Good to see someone else who uses the pendulum analogy as well.

It seems there has been a pendulum for the word pendulum in this thread. Something to think about...

This speaks to my post about the potential abuse of a law like this. If you want to shut down a bar, whether you're a crusading teetotaller, or have a conflict with the business itself, (maybe as a landlord or competitor) these laws are awfully convenient.

The officers are obligated to enforce the law, so once a call is made and the wheels are set in motion, the lives of the owner and patrons get complicated very quickly.

I guess since the Texas courts over turned the Sodomy Laws now all of those cops policing the bedrooms needed some other foolish law to enforce...

I once started to learn bartending, and the first thing they taught us was to never let the patrons get drunk... If the bartenders are doing their jobs properly and not just looking for tips, then they wouldn't have any "drunk" people in the bar. Maybe they should start arresting the bartenders at these facilities along with the drunks? Just my 2 cents worth.

At what point is a person considered drunk? The legal limit to drive a car? When he/she starts to slur? After a certain number of drinks? Passing out? Are the cops going to go in and give everyone a breathalyzer test? There is just too much room to manuever with this law and that makes me uncomfortable...I just hope Utah legislature doesn't get wind of this, or it'll probably be the next crazy alcohol law on our books.

its not the police doing it its the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission (TABC) their a completely seperate organization...
i dont really know much about the TABC... other then a lot of people feel they overstep their bounds

maybe we can get some more of the Texas guys in here...

http://www.tabc.state.tx.us/enforce/Insp.htm
I still don't get it. I put a call in to the TABC, and am expecting a call back by tomorrow. It's not illegal to be drunk in a bar, so no matter if you're a member of the TABC, FBI, NSA, BBC, or Jack Bauer....you have no right to arrest, detain, or harass ("nudge") anyone for being drunk in a bar. If they get roudy and cause trouble they can get slapped with disorderly/assault/etc...but that's not the case here.

Sooooooo.... let me get this straight. Not only are they arresting people for getting drunk at drinking establishments but they raided 36.....count them......36 bars and only found 30 drunks?

Shalafi, I'd say that those numbers indicate that they really were just looking for the fall down drunks who're likely to have blown their reserve of cab money on one more for the road.

Either way, the concept behind this stinks of the Minority Report plot of arresting people before they commit a crime.

As I was reading down the posts, you know what? I was thinking the *same* thing right when I got to yours... it made me smile.

As far as this goes, way too much room for interpretation... I always thought that Texas was a rather lax state anyway - who wants to go to a bar and not get drunk? Do you avert the ticket by not having your car at the bar, so you either have to have a DD or call a cab? I'm not too sure about the diving into swimming pools from deadly heights thing... I'd chalk it up to substance assisted Darwin.

Also, it partially is the cops' role to interpret the law. That's why they've got the power to issue warnings. After all, there were many more people drunk in those bars than were arrested...

Just wanted to comment on the "Drunk in Public" in a privately owned bar issue...

It's my uneducated understanding that an establishment can be privately owned bar, but as long as it is open to the general public, all the public decency laws still apply... public nudity, public urination, public drunkenness, y'know, the good stuff. If it were a membership establishment, or a private party in a normally open-to-the-public establishment, these laws do not and cannot apply. Again, that's just my crap understanding, I would love it if somebody could clarify more.

So, if a bar has a cover (pay $5 to get in) they could make a case that they are operating as a private club and be protected under "private property"? I think this is the way that some local establishments have avoided the enforcement of a smoking ban recently.

For me, this is just one more reason not to go to Texas. Apologies to all those friends who are from Texas, but I think we would be better off if Texas was part of Mexico.

This has already been touched on briefly, but there are some legal ramifications here. If a bar or restaurant knowingly OVERSERVES someone, the business is on the hook for their actions later. If you drink 10 shots in 10 minutes and get in your car an hour later, the people you hit can sue the bar for serving you those 10 shots and letting you get in your car. They will most likely win, too.

From the article posted, it's not clear what criteria the police were using for deciding who was intoxicated, what sort of BAC those people had or even if they had their car keys on them. The 36 bars raided may have been the starting point for a significant number of drunk drivers pulled over the weekend before.

I know that I'm going to be unpopular saying this, but if you're drinking heavily in a bar (i.e. BAC over .15) and you have your cars keys in your pocket, I applaud the arresting officer even if you aren't within eyeshot of your car. Clearly your intention is to drive home, and you're most likely not going to wait out your drunkenness. One of the insurance coverages that I sell a lot of is liquor liability, and I typically only see the ones where there's been a problem. Once there's a claim on one of these policies, it's usually $250,000 to start with and goes upwards pretty quickly.

In my past when I bartended in NJ and in Mass (in the early 80s) it was against the law to serve an intoxicated person, for the reason that the bar could be held liable for any damage that the drunken person causes. Some people would get a little beligerent when approaching the cut off stage, so what most bartenders would do is make the drink with all mixer then just float a little bit of booze on the top.. the drunk would never know...

I have no problem with the cops waiting outside of a bar, and pickup people as they get into their cars and drive off, but when they go into a bar, and randomly check people and arrest them, (this of course is without me knowing the facts of how they determined who is to be arrested) that is wrong.

The whole paradigm from when I lived in Charlotte is now starting to make sense.

There are no bars in Charlotte because drinking is sinful.

However, if you want to build a "club" that you let people "join" for a quarter, who are we to tell you what to do with your private club? Every bar in Charlotte is actually a private club with closed access. But access can be gained by submitting an extremely nominal sum, or if you come buy on oxygen night, everybody who breathes oxygen gets in.

Question: what is the purpose of a "drunk and disorderly" law?

Seems to me it is a prophylactic law. In other words, it is used to prevent you for breaking other laws.

Now I can see how this might be applicable if the person was drunk and about to drive off in their car. This makes sense. However, if am passed out in my car, sleeping off the alcohol, clearly I have taken the right course of action. I am not driving. Would you rather I slept in the street?

As for someone drunk and walking down the street... who am I hurting? If I am making excessive noise, I am disturbing the peace. Seems to me, a rather arbitrary law.

I knew there was a reason i shouldn't have started breathing fluorine! :lol:

In NJ - and i don't know how many other states... you can be sitting in your car, drunk as a skunk, and until you put your key in the ignition (not turning the key - just having it in the ignition) you are not doing anything wrong...

Sleeping in the street would probably be some sort of violation of a vagrancy law...

I find this amusing/absurd/astounding that this is happening in texas - a state where a gun permit is issued upon birth (sarcasm...) does this mean that if a person owns agun, that they can be arrested because they MIGHT kill someone someday?

Enforcing the law != setting up bullshit operations

Last night, me and a friend walked around Shinjuku drinking beer.

We sat outside of our bar, drinking. There is a police station some, 20 feet away.

I guess, people don't really drive as much, so that isn't a problem.

But there is puke Everywhere...

The second richest country in the world, doesn't give a shit who, what, where, or when you drink.

there *has* to be more to this story.
i wonder what the legal logic behind this operation is---it would be a state law with what i would imagine is really poor wording--rosy scenario--or it is a state law that passed with language that appears to blur alcohol in with other drugs, which was passed in part because it did so....which i would hope would be challenged and thrown out.
but who knows, maybe there is a neo-prohibitionist tendency in texas.

the only way in which these "stings" would even start ot make sense to me is if the bars raided are all located in places that can only be accessed via car, in places where there are no cab services and no drunk driver shuttle things that you could call---and if the cops could plauibly make the argument in court that these folk--trashed though they were--could only drive home. but even then, i cant imagine this being legit.

Warning for Texas Drunks
State on the lookout for overly drunk bar patrons
Some more info on the crackdown... .17 is pretty darned drunk...

Well- I guess this will also cut down onthe number of hookups based on beer goggle syndrome... :( /me makes note to never go to texass again... :D

thanks mal---i kinda sensed something like this...the logic of working to reduce drunk driving gets extended, following on some moralizing logic, to other "bad decisions"--yay---i think the state should take this all the way---all bad decisions should be pre-empted....

falling unwittingly for a real estate scam?---no problem----because bad investments lead to bad outcomes lead to shock and disappointment leads to drinking as medication leads to drunk driving and other bad things, arrest the investor before the contract is signed. another life saved...

a girl is preparing to break up with her boyfriend, using the "its not you its me" line-well, you know how that goes----so arrest her...

a graduate student is preparing for master's exams and is really feeling the pressure and decides to join up with friends to blow off some steam--o no, another bad potential situation--luckily, texas law enforcement can see into the future and so the arrest on the street outside his apartment was logical....


i am never---ever----going to texas.

Preemptive arrests are illegal since no crime has ben committed.

So you write a law that makes it legal. You are guilty of public drunkeness. It's no longer a preemtive arrest.

So, then how long is it until we're guilty of driving(we might speed or drive recklessly)? Or how long until owning a knife or gun is crime(since that may aid us in harming another individual)? Normally I don't buy into slippery slope arguments but I think on this one you almost have to.

The whole idea of a law supporting arresting people for being drunk to prevent drunk driving and other alcohol related crimes rests on it being factual that you cannot be drunk without driving drunk or committing an alcohol-related crime - which I have personally witnessed to not be the case more than a few times.

To make it a crime to be in a position capable of commiting a crime is ludicrous.

This whole debacle is nothing more than producing revenue for the state. This 'raid' has been all over the local talk radio and news channels. the TABC aren't arresting people that are falling down drunk, they are arresting people who might be talking loudly, slurring some words, or even looking like they can't walk straight. All of this is done without any blood or breath tests. The fines for these are $100 to $500 for patrons and they can go up to $15,000 for the bar owners. The people of texas are getting hopping mad about this and you can bet that if it gets back to Rick Perry ordering this or even encouraging it, it's gonna get ugly. right now, the TABC is hammering the media left and right to make sure that they put in every story exactly what the law says in order to justify this action. This isn't any different than the police writing 3x the tickets in a given period to produce revenue.

Until that hypothetical law is passed, these are illegal practices. There is a latin term that escapes me that says you can't be prosecuted for a crime that was committed before the law was passed, I can't remember it. I believe the englishg translation is "after the fact" or something. If there is no CURRENT law against being drunk in a bar, then they can't do anything about it until there is a law passed. While I personally frown upon drunkenness anywhere, I frown more on liberties being trampled on.

Edit: if there is anyone out there that has been a victim of this, contact a lawyer. You will win and save a lot of buzzed people from ridiculous fines from tyranical governmental organizations. If they tried to fine me, I'd refuse to pay. Peaceful civil disobedience is my middle name.

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.

That's deep.

How convenient, criminalize something that harms nobody, the arrest people for violating the new law. 50/50 on whether its' about "morality" or money.

How many convictions for sodomy occurred prior to Lawrence vs. Texas?

I've tried twice to type up a reasonable response here, but it just isn't coming. So here is my gut reaction:

If it makes it even a little less likely that bartenders will be serving people until they get drunk, or removes a few potential drunk drivers off the road, it's cool with me.

Of course, I think a person should lose their car, lose their liscense for a year, and spend a month in jail for a first drunk driving offense, and lose their liscense permanently and go to jail for six months on a second offense, so I'm not one to look to for sympathy here.

Gilda

It's all well and good to talk about stopping people from driving, but I keep thinking about the guy who didn't drive, or has a designated driver.

Why should *anyone* care if he gets drunk.

I'll read this as democrats for and republicans against. It looks like its as I suspected and all about the money :)

Please don't judge the whole state by this law. Like any other place (probably more so), we like to kick back a few cold ones. The only problem is that we also have a lot of churchies. These fucking do-gooders always want to stick their noses where they don't belong.

The religious right takes my beer and the liberals take my guns... so I am a libertarian.

Who's taking your beer again?

Wow, people are pissed off by the state enforcing the law. If the legislature wants to rewrite that law, then fine, but death threats to the folks enforcing it? Seriously.

how do you enforce that? That would put half of this country behind bars.

Dude, calling police officers "pigs" is sooooo 50 years ago. Ya'll need to come up with a better word.

If the police can articulate why they suspected that you were drunk, you were probably acting like an ass and were obviously intoxicated. Inside of a bar or outside on the street--- It doesn't make a difference.

Now, now, dksuddeth, I know that you and the rest of the gun nuts are chomping at the bit for the revolution to begin, but you can't start your "re-education" camps just yet.... :D

/deliberately misreading

To answer the question - you don't. By doing exactly what they're already doing, the TABC is forcing the bars to do a better job of self-policing, which they should be doing anyway. One of the parts of this story that keeps getting glossed over, mainly because it really doesn't qualify as "news", is that the TABC is ticketing the establishments for overserving people and serving minors. If the bar knows that they're going to get in trouble for overserving, which is against the law by the way, they aren't going to do it.

sorry i didnt read the entire thread so i dont know if this has already been brought up... but from what i understand it is illegal to be drunk in a bar and it's illegal for a bar to get you drunk. nutty

what they are actually doing is discouraging people to even be at a bar.

http://www.nbc5i.com/news/8313414/detail.html

I'm betting that this will get swept away very quickly, lest it hurt Perrys chances at re-election.

dksuddeth...that's interesting that out of state people are in on the uproar. way i see it, it's a chance for the people to legislate via their buying practices. boycott and economic re-direction is an excellent way to nullify an attempt to legislate something.

just ask the brits.

DK, this is beginning to be a "to-may-to/to-mah-to" debate. I think that they're encouraging bars to make sure that they don't overserve anyone. You think that they're discouraging people to drink in bars. What they're doing is making sure that people don't get drunk in bars. Can we agree on that? If the two of us go to our favorite Dallas watering hole and have a couple of beers apiece over a couple of hours and the TABC walks through, we're fine (unless you're acting "erratic" by spouting off about gun rights and the impending revolution :D ). Now if we pound down 10 shots each in 10 minutes, we're going to have a problem. And you know what, the bar shouldn't have served us since that's dangerous for us and those around us (especially whoever sitting near me, since I promise that I'd puke under these circumstances).

Let me get this straight - when it comes to guns, you don't want the government to pass any new laws but just enforce the ones on the books. However, when it comes to drinking, you don't want them to enforce the ones on the books but write new ones instead. Alcohol kills more people in the US than all the guns worldwide (ok, I made that stat up, but I'll be its close). If I overserve you at a party at my home and you go out and kill someone while driving, I'm potentially liable as the server. There's a reason to enforce the laws.

Not quite. I said we don't need any more laws IF they would enforce the ones that are already there. I, personally, think that they should actually do away with a few of them.

Not quite again. If TABC hits up a bar and they find people falling down drunk, I have no problem with them citing/arresting them. I do have a problem if they hit a hotel bar and arrest people that are staying AT the hotel. Thats a far cry from a more realistic 'wanting to stop drunk driving so we raided hooters' type of argument.

agreed, see my statement above. Again, if they hit up hooters or champs or the local strip club, fine. When you roust hotel patrons at the hotel bar who have no plans to go anywhere, thats an issue.

I agree with Willravel (and journeyman [?])...How can it *possibly* be legal to arrest someone when a crime Has Not Been Committed?

Why can't the agents sit in the parking lot and see how many apparently drunk folks get in the car and start it up, thereby pretty much proving their intent?

And raiding hotel bars, that's just the STUPIDEST thing I can possibly imagine. Why don't they start raiding folks indulging in the hotel room's minibars?!? Come, on, it's not that far off from the Hotel's bar.

Any how about arresting drunks for assault and battery, molesting poultry, and the myriad of other crimes that often take place under the influence?

I think that's the point of this new tactic - preventative maintenance. We all know that drunks do some stupid things, and if you're not allowing them to get out of control, then you theoretically keep a lid on the stupidity.

As far as a crime not being committed, I'm afraid that you're wrong. The bars are certainly overserving these folks, and that's against the law. The individuals in question are drunk in a public establishment. That's against the law as well. If you don't like the law, then get it changed.

Obviously I don't know the whole story, but I'll wager that the hotel bar in question has a history of either overserving patrons or serving underage patrons. Having been to many a hotel bar in my day, I can tell you that I've certainly been overserved in some and that I've done some considerable damage afterwards (my apologies Airport Hilton of Minneapolis for leaving a steaming pile of something in a stairwell on a bet). I'll agree that a hotel bar is an unlikely place for habitually overserving people but the Bi-Lo on Sutherland Avenue in Knoxville, TN was an unlikely place to sell beer to kids from a private school 10 miles away. That didn't stop it from happening.

Goddamn, that must be some good crack you are smoking.

If Dallas is anything like Los Angeles (near where I live), then a lot of dance clubs and bars are inside hotels. They are open to the street and the public, it's not like a bar lounge for the occupants. These are part of the night life.

Also, at the club I work at the servers have to cut off the men when they've had too much. If the vice squad comes into my club, then they would ticket the bartender for serving too much alcohol. It was like this in Oregon (where I grew up), too. Oh, and you can't buy liquor in supermarkets or on Sundays in Oregon, either. I bet it's against the law to overserve people everywhere and that this just became a big issue out of something that has already been law for a long time. And I don't go to bars to get drunk, but to hang out and have some fun.

I agree, this is another one of those silly laws dealing with alcohol that states pass from time to time that should be changed.

I'm going to go ahead and disagree with you there. It should not be legal for anyone to get falling down drunk in a bar, and the bars that do it should be penalized. Alcohol is fine in moderation, but it's poisonous and overconsumption can cause death, among other things. Drunks have notorious poor impulse control, and they also rarely realize how drunk they are. Having provided insurance for some establishments that habitually overserve patrons, I can confirm that drunks do drive and they also do other things that place themselves and others in danger, like riding on top of elevators, get in fights and drop things on people, just to name a few of the claims I have been involved in.

I get your point, I guess we are looking at this from different angles. I think the quote you reference by Benjamin Franklin applies here and I suppose you think otherwise. With designated drivers and such, not everyone who drinks too much should be subject to arrest. I especially do not like the idea that low paid servers should be responsible for determining how much liquor their patrons can hold, some people can handle much more than others.

it looks like the program has been suspended, at least temporarily...

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/3791210.html

10:25 PM---they just suspended all bar checks until the legislature does a review on Monday...

of coarse they have already issued tickets to 2200 people for being drunk---even when they had a designated driver....

more on this later....

Wait... The Texas legislature is going to do something? :rolleyes: I don't believe it.

Okay this just seams so very wrong to me, catching some one before they actually break a law. If the Owner or operator of a bar has a problem with you then they call the police. If not then they keep sucking up your money. You should be a "responsible" adult and either not drink too much or have some one there to take care of you if you do i.e. your DD. This eliminates the need for the police to come in and judge by there own standards (I found nothing that shows they have a set standard of drunk).

Now if the Police want to hang out outside of a bar and watch if your stumbling butt gets into your car and starts it up then cool. Once the car is started you intended to drive drunk and they grab you. You now started to commit a crime. This whole grabbing people drinking in bars is crap.

If only 30 people got arrested from 36 bars that were checked, I don't see what the problem is. Every bar has their drunk jackass causing problems, and they usually get the cops called on them anyhow.

http://www.nbc5i.com/news/8798212/detail.html

so, the texas legislature is telling the offending agency to police itself and change its ways. God, I love america. :|

Of course it comes from a higher authority, but I don't think that makes it right. I don't think it's as much the fault of the arresting officer so much as the Chief of Police or someone else who's influential and has a vested interest in this enforcement. The cops have to do it or they'll get fired, but if *all* officers felt it was unjust enforcement, I think the collective dissent would put a halt to it pretty quickly.

Police departments choose to enforce what they want more stringently or passively for many different reasons. I sure hope this particular reason isn't just to increase revenue (but I'm sure that's one of the driving factors). Usually it's just a very few people who have the power and decide to put selectively-enforced programs like this into place. Like the Police Chief, Mayor, Governor, President, and assorted influencial rich folks. It's definitely revenue-driven, but that's probably (hopefully) not the only reason why they're doing this.

Similarly, a while back my county department had a "Seatbelt Challenge" where officers were rewarded for pulling over the most people who aren't wearing seatbelts. They don't do that anymore; It was selective enforcement only during that period of time -- now they probably won't pull you over just for not wearing a seatbelt unless they were hunting for PC. I knew a few people who got pulled over during that time, and I haven't heard of anyone getting pulled over just for that since the program ended. In my mind, that was just as silly as this bullshit operation.

My thoughts exactly. Though, the whole "they were ordered to do it for a revenue stream" seems pretty likely too. Bunch o' crap.