Despite decades of public campaigning, steady increases in penalties, and even the advent of ride-sharing apps, some 10,000 Americans are killed each year by drunk drivers. These are preventable deaths, each one an outrage and a tragedy. The Washington Post, for its part, has therefore traditionally taken a hard line on drunk driving, bemoaning in 2015, for example, Maryland’s “coddling” of drunk drivers, and in 2016, that state’s “enabling” of them.
And then along came Donald Trump.
On April 28, the Post published an article meant to make the point that the Trump administration is targeting illegal immigrants who have not committed crimes. “ICE data shows half of immigrants arrested in raids had traffic convictions or no record,” reads the headline (which, curiously, omits the word “illegal” or even “undocumented” before “immigrants.”) The blogger Alan Tonelson, meanwhile, looked under the hood and found that, of the 675 arrests mentioned in the story, 147 people were convicted of drunk driving, and 66 more had traffic-related charges pending. Yet these DUIs were downgraded to “traffic convictions” in the Post‘s telling. So in other words, Tonelson determined, of the 675 picked up, in fact only 25 percent had no conviction—not “half.”
It’s odd, to the say the least, that the Post would lump DUI convicts in with those with “no record.” For one, in every state except Wisconsin, driving under the influence is in fact a criminal offense and not a “traffic offense.” It’s absurd to compare it with, say, parking in a restricted zone. To call drunk driving a “traffic violation” is akin to calling axe-murdering a “logging violation.”
Mother’s Against Drunk Driving (MADD), the nation’s leading anti-drunk driving organization, agrees. In an statement emailed to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, MADD said, “Drunk driving is never just a minor traffic offense. It is a 100 percent preventable crime that kills more than 10,000 people every year.” But these days, it would appear that the Post is more upset about the enforcement of our nation’s immigration laws than the needless suffering caused by drunk driving.
