Thursday, July 29, 2010

AAIM's misguided recognition

Points to anyone who sees what's wrong with this.

"Congratulations are in order for Cary Police officers Geoffrey Witherow, Ryan Sherman, Tricia Malone and Kathy Eiring, who made a combined 38 DUI arrests in 2009. In May, the Alliance Against Intoxicated Motorists recognized the four for their work. Witherow made the most DUI arrests out of the group with 25. Sherman and Malone had seven DUI arrests, with Eiring posting six arrests. Statistics show there were 70 total DUI arrests in Cary last year. Cary Acting Chief Ed Fetzer recommended that AAIM honor the four officers responsible for more than 50 percent of them. "Anytime an arrest has been made, we feel a life has been saved," said Anita Huvaere, the AAIM staffer who compiled the statistics for Illinois towns. "That's why we recognized the officers."" Daily Herald.

Every year, AAIM honors officers based on the number of arrests for DUI in Illinois.  All this does is promote arrests.  I'd be more interested in seeing how many of these arrests resulted in findings of guilty.  To suggest that lives were saved because someone was arrested is making some enormous assumptions that may (or may not) be warranted, given the extremely low rate of fatalities as measured against the wildly speculative numbers thrown around by organizations like AAIM of Illinois motorists committing DUI on an annual basis.  AAIM and MADD are constantly crying about how many DUIs are undetected.  If they're right, and if they're consistent, where's the bloodbath? 

3 comments:

  1. How many points do I get for recognizing what a tool you are for complaining that such recognition promotes arrests? Do you think we should discourage D.U.I. arrests? You asked, "Where's the bloodbath?" If it was someone you loved who was killed or injured by an impaired driver you might realize that even one person hurt by this crime is too many. Being impaired does not guarantee that the driver will harm others. It just increases the chances. Maybe if you get injured by one of these criminals you defended you wouldn't say more stupid things like you've said here.

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    1. I'm afraid you get none, having missed the point. I am not saying that DUI arrests are a bad thing. Nor am I saying that encouraging police officers to arrest people they believe have committed DUI is a bad thing. What I am saying is that AAIM is not encouraging quality, just quantity. And that is not good in any way.
      Now if AAIM can come up with a way to promote high QUALITY arrests, such as donating their prize money to fund more intensive training programs for officers, that would be entirely different!

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