When you’re pulled over drunk, the cops have a pretty easy, quick, and generally sound way of testing it. They can smell the alcohol, give you a breathalyzer test, and right there in the field decide whether to arrest you.
That’s not necessarily the case if you’re high on drugs, though. But Georgia police departments have resorted to using “expert” police who can detect signs of drug use. It’s a lot less precise, and a local news station in Atlanta has built a pretty strong case against the practice.
11 Alive interviewed three people arrested on suspicion of driving high, who insisted when pulled over that they were innocent. All three cases were thrown out months later after toxicology tests proved they were completely sober. In the meantime, they had their lives pretty much ruined on the basis of the expertise of one of the 250 officers in the state who have been trained to recognize signs of marijuana use.
According to the story, the officer involved in all three of the arrests of sober drivers has been given a raise, a promotion, and even a trophy based on his number of DUI arrests — not convictions. The Cobb County Police Department said “they stand behind the arrests.”
This is pretty troubling stuff, akin to the story earlier this century when D.C. police were arresting people for driving with less than the legal limit of alcohol in their system. This Atlanta piece is worth reading in its entirety. In one case, a waitress lost her permit to serve alcohol (and thus her job) as a result of the bogus arrest, only to have charges dropped four months later when her toxicology blood screening came back negative. When she filed a complaint, only to have the department absurdly defended the officer’s actions and even claimed that the test results probably came back wrong.
In fact, according to this report, the police maintain that their trained officers’ drug impairment recognition is “better and more reliable than a scientific blood or urine test.” An astounding claim.
Obviously, drugged driving is a real problem, and we want police to get people off the road when they’re stoned. But it’s a problem that police are still trying to catch up with technologically in terms of quick and accurate sobriety tests. They’re evidently using shortcuts that don’t always work — we don’t know how many other cases there are like these three — and it threatens to do real harm to innocent people’s lives.
State legislators should start thinking about ways of holding the police more accountable in this regard, or requiring a stricter process before such arrests are conducted.
