9:00am checkpoints? What a great idea. The sooner we catch our alcoholic CEO’s, the better.
Perhaps your neighborhood is in the vicinity of a business that runs 24 hour operations and thus has a night shift. When I worked 11PM to 7AM, many of my coworkers habitually capped off their week’s work by meeting up somewhere and getting hammered. Perhaps your police officers were aware of such a gathering and wanted to encourage them to rethink this behavior.
Isn’t it also true that after a major evening drinking binge, one could easily still be over the limit at 9 the next day?
That is what the NZ PSA was strongly suggesting. We do have binge drinking issues here though.
It’s likely that the SFPD got some grant money tossed to them by CDOT, or CALTRANS, or whatever it is these days, via the feds to put these checkpoints up. That’s where the Illinois money came from for the seatbelt enforcement checkpoints that my fellow Illinoisians are going to be seeing all this holiday weekend.
The residential bit was one of two things a) the person administering the program is lazy, and just wants the grant money or, the more likely b) there have been public complaints from the area that are being addressed.
Yep. See posts #13 and #17.
Actually, San Jose has LOTS of checkpoints, depending on the time of year. HUGE checkpoints. I certainly hope protocol today isn’t to play the finger game with your eyes, though. THat might annoy me a bit. It used to be “Howyadoin tonight, have you been drinking?”
Sam
Texas is doing the seatbelt thing too this weekend. Since sobriety checkpoints are not allowed in TX, they figure this is their best revenue enhancer. Of course, I also saw a nasty speedtrap on Preston road yesterday designed to make damn sure you’re not doing 40 in a 35 mph zone.
Was it a school zone? Those are the only places I’ve heard Texas cops being real strict about…
As a Dallas school teacher I can assure you that no schools on Preston Road had children in them yesterday.
I love this time of year.
Nope, just Highland Park trying to make some money on a holiday weekend.
Actually, IIRC they** have** to do that. If they don’t give you an alternate way to get where you are going, then it is entrapment, or random searching, or some such that is unconstitutional. They have to give notice of the checkpoint, and allow for alternate routes. That was all laid out in the Ingersoll decision.
Happens here quite a bit as well around long weekends, Paddies Day and xmas. A lot of them are placed so as to catch the gobshites going back to the pub car park to get their car in the morning after a heavy night.
Not strange tests here either. Just a quick chat and if they have any suspicions then it’s a breathalyzer and then off to the cop shop for a blood test.
Quite an effective way to get the massage across to people who think they’re fine after a few hours sleep if you ask me. People with drink still in their system are on the roads when the traffic is heavy and kids are going to school etc.
There are also a lot of shift workers here. When I worked shift and finished at 6am it was a fairly regular thing to head into a early house(pub that opens early) and get pissed after a weekend of night shifts. We all got taxis though 
Well, i learn something every day.
And, in learning, i become aware of one of the most patently ridiculous things i’ve ever heard of.
Bolding mine.
The cops in Ireland sure are nicer than the ones here!
Well they don’t carry guns so they have to keep us happy 
Well, the ones I’ve seen here usually involve half a dozen police cars, lights a-blazin’, and sometimes a large trailer type vehicle with a big ol’ SFPD shield on the side.
My husband almost creamed a cop the other night at a checkpoint- he saw several cars on the side of the road with their flashers on, and he was slowing down to see if something was wrong or if there had been an accident. As he was looking on that side, he looked up to see a cop in the middle of the road waving him over- he damned near hit him! No flashlight, no reflective vest, no nothing. Just standing on the center line. Um, maybe they should have had the drunk test.
I’ve been through a few here, especially a few years ago when I was working a lot of overtime (the Ottawa end of the bridges over the river between here and Hull, where I work, were a favourite spot for catching drivers who had been taking advantage of the two hour later bar closing time in Hull). Usually a half dozen cars with traffic cones blocking all but one lane and a constable with a flashlight and bright reflective vest waving cars down. A head at the window “Have you had any drinks tonight, sir?”, a “No, I haven’t”, and I was waved through.
I have no idea what would have happened if I had been drinking, whether at legal or illegal levels (I don’t drink much anyway, and never when I’m driving). At one stop, the policeman pointed out that one headlight was out, I said thanks and I would have it fixed, and I was waved on.
There is usually a publicity campaign before a major RIDE (Reduce Impaired Driving Everywhere IIRC) enforcement blitz, but I’ve never seen any references to locations other than “throughout the Ottawa area” general statements. The big blitzes happen on major holiday periods, but checkpoints happen at a lower frequency throughout the year. I run into them two or three times a year and I don’t drive a lot.
My favourite drink-driving story (I think I’ve posted it before). My dad says it happened to a mate of his, but anything my dad says can usually be found on Snopes. :
Saturday morning, and a bloke put his lawnmower in his car to take it to get repaired. The lawnmower guy said it’d be an hour or two, so our bloke thinks “stuff it, it’s only a mile home, I’ll go to the pub and have a few beers while I’m waiting.”
Fast forward a couple of hours, and we find our mate driving home with his newly-fixed mower in the back. He tops a hill, and there are the cops at the bottom of the dip with a huge breathalysing operation in progress. There is nowhere to turn before he reaches them, and a U-turn would be far too obvious. Suddenly, he gets a brainwave: he pulls his car into the driveway of a stranger’s house as if he lives there. He knows the cops are watching him, he can’t go inside the house, and sitting in the car would look obvious, so the only way he can kill time until the cops leave ,and simultaneously have them think he lives there, is to pull the mower out of the car and start mowing the lawn. This he does.
Next thing the front door of the house flies open and a man is standing in the doorway: “Mate, who the hell are you?”
“Listen mate, I know it looks weird but there are cops down the road, and I’m over the limit. I want them to think I live here so that they don’t come up and breathalyse me”.
“Well good. When you’ve finished mowing my front yard, you can start on the back one. My name is Senior Sergeant Johnstone of the District Police Area Command…”