OWI has its consequences
When the feds pass out money to up the enforcement of drinking and driving laws, most people thinks this is a good thing. More OWI arrests = safer roads for everyone. What often is missed in this analysis is the consequences down the road.
Allen County is now looking for money to hire another prosecutor just to keep up with the additional OWI cases coming into the prosecutor’s office because of increased enforcement paid for with federal grants:
Money to pay for programs to curb drunken driving has traditionally gone to police departments to increase arrests. But other areas of the criminal justice system have been ignored, creating a backlog in the prosecutor’s office, which has to process the increased caseload.
Indeed, Allen County has become a victim of its own success; arrest rates for drunken driving have more than doubled in the last five years. In 1999 there were 1,399 arrests and in 2003 there were 2,836. Richards says that her office is working on 700 to 900 felony driving cases. This does not include the number of misdemeanor OWI cases, which is even higher.
Police Chief Rusty York agrees that typically his side of the criminal justice system gets grant money that does not necessarily trickle down. The more arrests police make, the more it affects the jail and judicial side of the criminal justice system. In the last four years Fort Wayne has received more than $542,000 for increased drunken driving enforcement. The money has enabled police to heighten enforcement almost every weekend night.
Link to the story, thanks to True Believer for finding this story.
Another consequence of these federal grants is to force police to make stops that they otherwise would not have. For the “innocent” this may mean a minor inconvenience as you are pulled over for a minimal traffic offense that would normally be overlooked by an officer working the beat. For the “guilty,” it definitely increases the chance that you will be caught (one of these days). For all of us, it means greater government scrutiny of our lives, something that we are becoming increasingly more accustomed to, but something that seems foreign to many people’s view of the Land of the Free.
And the pressure on officers is real. Here is a copy of a memo issued by our local police department to encourage officers to up their arrest numbers in order to keep the federal dollars rolling in.
