We were in BC Supreme Court the other day and the judge expressed exasperation at the errors made by the police. How could they screw this up so badly?
We have the answer to that: police make mistakes, just like everyone else (perhaps with greater consequences?), and not every utterance made by a cop is true.
There is a strange yet widely held belief that police are somehow more essential and therefore more deserving of respect than the general population.
We were actually surprised by the question. You see, we deal with police every day because we handle a lot of driving cases and Immediate Roadside Prohibitions. One of the fatal flaws that we see in the IRP law is that it is founded on unquestioned trust in the police. And that’s a big problem.
It’s easy being a cop. It’s tough being a cop.
We like most of the police officers we deal with. There are many hard-working cops who read our blog, sympathize with our positions and let us in on all sorts of things that we then investigate further. The traffic cops have one of the most difficult jobs in policing because they are often subject to public derision, they need to spend hours and hours driving and sitting in a car, and every pull over has the risk of being abused by the driver (and passengers) or struck from a passing vehicle. On top of that they breathe in exhaust fumes for much of the day, face the significant possibility of being in a bad accident and many people assume that they’re fascists on a power trip.
Mind you, there is a strange yet widely held belief that police are somehow more essential and therefore more deserving of respect than the general population, such as engineers who design safe roads and cars, janitorial staff who keep hospitals sanitary, etc. It’s a weird thing that we have in North America – we have this great deference to people in occupations defined as first responders. So there is some status in simply being a police officer.
Still, the deference is largely overblown. The simple fact is that most people are law abiding, our communities are held together by common interests and if the police vanished for a few days our society might very well continue on without anyone noticing.
An aside
Interestingly, a decade or so back I hired a former VPD detective to do some private detective work for me on a file. He was a police officer for his entire career. He told me as a police officer he had no concept of really working for a living. He said for him and his work pals, their work day consisted of lots of coffee, pranks with and on other officers, a few telephone calls, complaining about prosecutors, complaining about defence lawyers and over the course of 8 hours, about 30 minutes worth of actual work. He told me this because for him, working as a private investigator was a whole new world. He actually had to work! Customers actually expect results and value from his work, which was all new to him as a retired VPD detective.
Trust in the police
Which brings us back to an important point. All police officers are different, they have different values and a different concept of their job. Some are smart and trustworthy. Many are decent and honest. Some seem to have a chronic honesty problem. Some are not too bright and make a lot of mistakes. Some are unbalanced weirdos.
When the judge posed that rhetorical question, it put a point on an issue that is a huge flaw of the IRP scheme, which is that the entire process relies on absolute trust in the police.
The prohibition starts before any opportunity for a hearing. What if the officer is dishonest or is mistaken? The driver is punished long before any hearing and at the hearing there is no real questioning of the police evidence because it’s submitted as a paper report and the officer can’t be examined either at the RoadSafetyBC tribunal or on appeal to court.
What do the stats show?
On several occasions over the year we obtained statistics with respect to what types IRPs were issued. Early on we noticed something peculiar, which was that the when the IRP scheme was introduced, there was a sudden massive drop in the number of people who were issued driving prohibitions for blowing Warn. It made us think that there was really no point to .05 as a legal standard because so few people fell in that range.
Before the IRP law was introduced, if you blew a Fail you’d be arrested. If you blew a Warn, you’d get a 24-hour prohibition. If all police officers were honest, and the tests were properly taken there would be no reason for the sudden and dramatic drop in Warn-range prohibitions.
This was discussed in our last blog post in which we posed a question that a number of people correctly answered. Robert P. gets the shout out (with special mention to Stephen, Kenneth, Dave and apologies to those I’ve missed).
On the bottom of page 18 of the ‘Report on British Columbia’s 2010 Impaired Driving Initiative (IDI)’ the authors state:
It is not known exactly why the numbers of short-term prohibitions have declined so dramatically since the introduction of the IDI. However, it may simply reflect the uptake and use of ASDs for BAC testing at roadside.
An answer springs to mind, but it has nothing to do with the use of ASDs. Almost all 24-hour prohibitions issued before the IRP law came into play were done so on the basis of an ASD test. So the fact of ASDs is not an answer.
No, it seems to me that police officer honesty is probably the more significant factor. You see, in Vancouver for example, if you were pulled over and blew into an ASD, it was very likely that you’d get a 24-hour prohibition and that was the end of it. Did it mean that you blew Warn? Not necessarily. It could be that you blew Fail, but the officer for whatever reason didn’t record it that way.
It seems more likely that often officers would let people off with a 24-hour prohibition even when they blew Fail. Additionally perhaps what has happened is that since the IRP scheme was introduced, some officers claim drivers have blown Fail when the true result was Warn.
In either case, the officer is being untruthful.
In their analysis of the stats, it’s possible that ICBC has been blinded by their trust in the police. When it comes to the perplexing question about exactly why the numbers of short-term prohibitions have declined so dramatically, ICBC may want to consider whether systemic or semi-systemic lying by the police about ASD results provides the answer.
In my mind police dishonesty is best explanation for the dramatic decline of Warn range driving prohibitions.