Between September 20, 2010 and November 30, 2011, simply being in British Columbia was a high-stakes game of chance. If a police officer claimed that an unidentified witness claimed you drove, that was good enough to prove you were a driver. Time of driving didn’t matter, so long as there was no suggestion that you drank after driving. The police could make an ASD breath demand with no evidence of alcohol consumption, because there was no remedy so long as they managed to obtain a sample. And then there’s the ASD.
Regularly we had people tell us that they’d either had nothing to drink, or one drink, and they would ask how this could have happened to them. The simple answer is that the ASD is a screener. No one expects it to be accurate all of the time. Heck, they only check it once a month and they don’t tell anyone when they discover it has been malfunctioning. The instrument at the detachment, a BAC Datamaster (A.K.A. the Breathalyzer), is generally a very reliable device and it checks itself with each test. That’s why it’s used.
Generally speaking, the BAC Datamaster is used because it is reliable and accurate. Not so with the ASDs. We recently received BAC Datamaster records from the VPD that showed in one month 20% of the people arrested and forced to blow into the Datamaster had a blood alcohol content well under .08mg%. Surprisingly, 15% were below .045mg% when tested with a BAC Datamaster. Why were those individuals arrested in the first place? The police relied on the results of an ASD to form their opinion and make the arrest.
If you really “gots to know” why you blew a Fail when you had nothing to drink, check out this record for ASD 032562 in Kamloops. When they tested it at the end of the month, with an alcohol standard that should probably have given between .074mg% and .078mg%, the reading was .032mg%. Then they re-calibrated it and it appeared to be working. Then they tested it again for good measure, still using the same standard. The reading? Wait for it…
.172mg%.
You might be better off taking your chances with Harry Callahan’s .44 Magnum than to blow into ASD 032562. How many people blew false Fails on this device before the RCMP discovered the problem? We’ll never know. Thankfully, this was just before the IRP scheme came into effect, so reliable BAC Datamaster evidence would have exonerated anyone who was falsely arrested. There were no such protections under the Immediate Roadside Prohibition scheme.
(Note: when they do calibration tests, they set the device to display the actual reading, rather than simply giving Warn or Fail.)