After years of defending drinking and driving cases, and after having reviewed studies, reports and disclosure in thousands of DUI cases, and after having conducted hundreds of breath tests with a dozen different police breathalyzers, you might think that we’ve gained more confidence in the reliability of breathalyzer testing. But that’s not the case. What we’ve found and learned over the years raises concerns that would have never crossed our minds a decade ago. We no longer have any confidence in breath testing to determine blood-alcohol content, or blood tests for that matter. We don’t trust the police and we don’t trust their breathalyzer machines.
When the first version of the IRP scheme came out back in September 2010, we started collecting internal police documents that demonstrated wide-spread malfeasance and incompetence by police officers in British Columbia with respect to calibrating and maintaining Approved Screening Devices. We revealed some of the more easily explainable examples to the media and we discussed the problems here on our blog.
We did this because British Columbians deserve to know that this type of breath testing should never be used to justify punishment, and we wanted to shame the police into adopting better practices. If you’re curious about what we were doing back then, search Port Moody on the search feature on the upper right side of your screen.
Then the law was struck down, and no IRPs for Fail were issued for 6 months. Interestingly, during this 6-month period when the IRP scheme was not used, deaths from drunk driving was very low compared to previous years.
The scheme came back in June 2012. There were a few tweaks to the law, but nothing in the law to provide any assurance that ASDs were properly maintained or calibrated, or that problems with the devices would be reported to people who were issued an IRP. The police in BC started including a document that they call a Certificate of Qualified ASD Calibrator with the disclosure in IRP cases. They fax this in to their friends at the Office of the Superintendent of Motor Vehicles in each IRP case, and a copy of these documents are provided to people who appeal their IRP.
In the summer of 2012 we realized that in Vancouver the police were just filling out the document once, photocopying it and writing on the breathalyzer serial number on the top afterward rather than producing a document for each device when it was tested. This was a shortcut in a flawed system that an officer took advantage of until we exposed what he was doing.
Why we don’t trust the police
There are many wonderful police officers in BC. We find that the older, and usually therefore more experienced officers, who have no interest in the success or failure of the IRP scheme, are cynical like us. It’s encouraging that in the last few years so many experienced older police officers have congratulated us on our efforts.
Having said that, we don’t trust the police any more, or their breathalyzers because of what we continue to find in secret police documents.
It has taken some time due to the slow wheels of government bureaucracy. It has been difficult to force the police detachments to disclose their documents. Still, we have now put together a massive collection of ASD maintenance and calibration records since the IRP law was changed. We have obtained countless ASD records through freedom of information legislation.
Perhaps it won’t surprise you that we have found incompetency in ASD maintenance and calibration, coverups of malfunctions, and falsified ASD Certificate of Qualified ASD Calibrator documents. When the police determined that ASDs were giving inaccurate readings too often for their liking, to avoid embarrassment and condemnation they came up with a cover-up scheme that they’ve successfully employed for months now.
We think that it’s impossible that the government is unaware of what the police are getting away with. After all, there is a police officer who works in the OSMV office to tell them what’s going on. And we’ve had reports from police officers that they’ve received phone calls from the OSMV regarding IRP reviews that were before them.
If we were in court, rather than dealing with a tribunal in a government office, we’d be able to put a stop to this type of bad police behavior. Instead, the police are emboldened to do wrong because they can get away with it.
Which is one of the reasons that we don’t trust the police.