Quotas. It should come as little surprise that police officers are expected to demonstrate that they are doing their job and not just driving around town on the taxpayer’s dime. Therefore, a street/traffic police officer is expected to be writing citations (one of the primary functions of the street cop). Sadly, some bureaucrats cannot imagine any kind of rating system that doesn’t involve strict numbers which results in situations where a police officer is implicitly expected to bring in so many citations/month to prove he is doing his job. Worse yet, in some cases these same bureaucrats base promotion on these same numbers. I cannot speak for the policies of the Greater Los Angelese area, but this is not true of all PDs and some PDs are trying to evaluate police performance in other manners, but it is a diffcult task because of the unique nature of the job.
One Cell’s Particular Case. It is not unimaginable that the officer followed One Cell home and although he was showing signs of poor driving skill after leaving a drinking establishment it didn’t seem more dangerous compared to turning on his lights and siren and possibly causing a pursuit (many PDs are under a lot of pressure to reduce pursuits). So, he waited until the suspect (One Cell) got home and was out of his car. This is not an unheard of policy, although again I cannot speak for the specific policies of the Greater Los Angeles Area.
pld, the point is that harsh drunk driving laws don’t necessarily work in terms of stopping an alcoholic’s proclivity to drive. You say that the fellow in the Washington Post article you quoted, “never served signifigant jail time.” The post article itself says:
“Yesterday’s sentence was by far the longest Dowdy has received since his first drunken driving arrest in 1984, according to court records. Until the current 18-month sentence in Frederick, he had never been ordered to jail for longer than 10 months. On his ninth and 10th convictions, in 1997, he served 12 weekends in jail and 18 months of home detention in addition to court-ordered treatment for alcoholism.”
Never been sentenced to jail for longer than 10 months! Personally, I think serving 10 months in the pokey is pretty signifigant length of time, as is spending 12 weekends in jail, as is 18 months of home detention (which is quite costly dollarwise and which is at the defendant’s out of pocket expense) and even after serving all that, the miscreant in questions behavior didn’t change. To my mind, that proves that jailing alcoholics doesn’t cure alcoholism or stopping them from driving drunk.
To my mind, that means we jailing them even longer should be required. after 3 convictions, he should be locked up until he is to old to even attempt to drive a car.