The Abbotsford Police are in damage control. And their spin does not have traction.
Yesterday morning an Abbotsford officer was on the Bill Good show with host Michael Smyth. You can download it or listen to it here. The officer argued that this is similar to a cell phone needing repair. He argued that this should somehow engender confidence in the system — that an officer noticed after the device had been employed for more than three weeks that it was giving false fail readings. He refused to answer the question regarding whether they notified anyone about it, and particularly whether they notified anyone else who blew into this unit. He suggested that we were attacking the Abbotsford police.
If your cell phone failed, would you lose your license, career, $4700 and perhaps your home? Could your cell phone malfunction mean the loss of some other person’s license, their career, $4700 and potentially their home? How about a few dozen people? If you could reverse the damage by notifying those people, would you not do that?
Noteworthy is that this particular device had a similar major malfunction 6 months earlier.
The host did a good job posing questions. The officer tried to re-direct the conversation back to his talking points. In the end he did not answer the important question, which is did the police notify those who deserved to know about this information?
How does this inspire confidence in the IRP scheme?
How does not answering this one important question inspire confidence in the police?
We already knew the answer to the question because we made an FOI about it a few months ago. You can guess what it is.
When you do not like the message, shoot the messenger. Which is why some wish to attack us, or lawyers in general. This is simply misguided. The ASD records speak for themselves.
As for the Abbotsford police, we are not attacking them — we accept that they maintained their devices in accordance with most guidelines, and when they made mistakes they were honest mistakes. The problem is the IRP scheme is based on ASD results. The Alco-sensor IV, and most of the other ASDs available, are fine devices. But they should not be the basis of punishment.
Speaking of records, there was one mentioned on the program about which we received a few emails. So, without wishing to be too hard on Abbotsford, we are posting this one below.
This is an interesting document because it was disclosed to us twice and it clearly has a post-it note on top. It speaks to the honesty of the person who prepared the FOI — they could have simply destroyed the post-it and we would not have know about it. The information is remarkable.
It appears that the post-it was added after the device had mistakenly been taken out for use on patrol. The device should have been marked for repair due to a major malfunction.
The device would have been in use up until a week before the IRP scheme started, so luckily it is unlikely that IRPs were issued on it when it was out being used by the police in this condition. But a number of people may have been wrongfully accused of refusing to provide an ASD sample. We certainly hope no one was convicted for refusing to blow into this device.
The note says:
Repeated to VOID for test sample.
CALIBRATION OK.
IF RETURNED BY PATROL SEND TO DAVTECH
