The Vancouver police announced Monday that drinking and driving is up — over the weekend the number of people issued Immediate Roadside Prohibitions was much greater than last year.
We note that the Government claims drinking and driving was down significantly in 2011. We also note that the weather was terrible in the most heavily populated regions of British Columbia at this time last year, and in fact 2011 was the year without a summer.
So we think it has more to do with the weather than anything. And as we’ve noted before, drinking and driving numbers decline whenever there are newsworthy changes in the law. The resumption of the IRP scheme for Fail was barely a blip on the news radar. So, IRP scheme or no IRP scheme, the police still stop people for drinking and driving.
Of course, Vancouver is somewhat unusual. For whatever reason they seem to always have a significant number of Approved Screening Devices that are malfunctioning or giving inaccurate readings at any given time. It is possible that drinking and driving is up because their devices are giving inaccurate readings or over-reporting the blood-alcohol content of those people tested.
We have records for Approved Screening Devices from all over BC. We have decided to post a list containing the serial number of the ASDs for which we have some disclosure, starting with Vancouver. We have created a page where you can see if we have any historic records for the device you blew into.
When we review the disclosure for any Vancouver Police case the first thing we go to is our database of maintenance and calibration records to determine if our client has blown into a faulty device.
You can visit our page where we list the Vancouver ASDs for which we have disclosure here.
If you want us to help you defend an Immediate Roadside Prohibition, give us a call.