The Soon-To-Be Viral 4th Of July DUI Checkpoint Video

Not sure where this took place, but it was apparently shot Thursday night somewhere in America. And it comes from one of the hundreds of DUI road blocks ubiquitous during 4th of July weekends across the fruited plain.

The video doesn’t exactly show fascism in America, and it doesn’t show anybody getting beaten up. What it does show is how federal dollars are incentivizing local police to set up armed camps in the middle of busy thoroughfares looking for an easy way to churn arrest numbers for DUI tickets.

Local law enforcement makes a ton of money in federal dollars off those arrests. And DUI attorneys make a ton of money defending DUI arrestees. Some of the fees those attorneys make get plowed into judicial elections, which makes judges happy. And there are lots of prosecutors around the country who do a nice trade in getting DUI’s knocked down to something else, or wiped off the books completely, in exchange for cash or favors under the table.

It’s a corrupt little pinwheel, and it works really well to grease everybody involved except for the poor guy or girl who had a couple of glasses of wine with dinner just in time to blow a 0.09 on the breathalyzer.

But if you’ll watch the video, you’ll see that the principal involved doesn’t even get asked if he’s been drinking or if he’ll blow in the tube. He gets hassled for another reason…

The thing is, the current generation of college kids and 20-somethings is completely eaten up with the concept that their rights are more important than the well-being of society – a concept which without question has some value but is taken to an absurd extreme. Edward Snowden, who recognized a perfectly actionable policy abuse the Obama administration is perpetrating on the American people and opted to blow that up into giving away the store to America’s enemies from an intelligence and public-relations standpoint rather than go through acceptable channels within the process, is a good example.

And the kid in the video is guilty of playing drama queen. It doesn’t sound like he was roughed up, it’s not like his rights were egregiously violated and he only says the drug-sniffing dog scratched up his car rather than actually showing it – which wouldn’t have been difficult to do. Furthermore, one can sympathize with the cops who have to spend a whole night on a road somewhere dealing with drunks and irritated motorists who even if they haven’t been drinking are still probably tired, cranky, want to go home and aren’t thrilled about the inconvenience of getting processed at a paramilitary roadblock.

That having been said, are we really at a point in this country where it’s worth spending your tax dollars to have law enforcement officers act like jackboots toward innocent citizens just because they showed up unwillingly at a given place at a given time? Even if this doesn’t constitute the egregious abuse of civil rights the kid in the video claims, it’s certainly obnoxious.

And it’s of questionable effectiveness. How many drunks leaving the bar got a text message from their friends telling them to avoid x road because of y checkpoint found their way home via a different route? And how many of those drunks could have been caught simply by the cops being out patrolling the streets looking for unsafe drivers? Instead of that, which we could all agree is perfectly reasonable and unoppressive law enforcement, we’re collecting all the cops in one place to stand around and intimidate people who may or may not have done anything wrong.

It’s a stupid policy. It degrades and undermines the public’s faith in law enforcement. It’s the product of over-the-top lobbying by groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving, which has done a lackluster job of attacking the cultural problem of drunk driving by persuasion and has instead focused on intimidating lawmakers into one-upping each other with restrictive legislation aimed at establishing an unenforceable zero-tolerance policy on “drunk driving;” the National Transportation Safety Board is actually trying to reduce that blood-alcohol level signifying “legally drunk” to 0.05, which has the National Restaurant Association screaming.

The fact is that people who have a couple of drinks are not a particular threat to anyone’s safety. It’s the people who are falling-down wasted getting behind the wheel who are a threat. And yes, you’ll catch those people with armed camps set up in the middle of the street – but you’ll catch them by patrolling as well.

We’re for law enforcement here at the Hayride. What we’re not for is the federal government paying local cops to act like the Stasi around regular folks. The cops we’ve talked to really don’t like working these DUI checkpoints; they’d much rather see themselves as peace officers than people who get paid to haul folks off to jail, and that’s pretty much all the checkpoints are.

But now they’re a 4th of July tradition thanks to your tax dollars. They’re as American as fireworks on the 4th. Of course, fireworks are illegal in most places and where they aren’t the do-gooder crowd is doing everything they can to make them that way. If anybody’s getting anywhere wiping out those checkpoints we sure haven’t seen it.

UPDATE: Murfreesboro, Tennessee is where this video was shot.

Also, to clarify the entitled-Millenial thing from above, in case it’s not that well understood…this is a generation raised on trophies-for-everybody soccer leagues and self-esteem-as-education, and the effects on a lot of them are obvious. Interview kids right out of college for jobs and you’ll run into shining examples all the time a lot like this

If first impressions count, some millennials seem to make sure their first impressions are their last.

Hiring managers have noticed young, newly graduated job seekers are doing some strange and inappropriate things during interviews, USA TODAY reports.

In one case, USA TODAY reports a college senior brought her cat to her interview – even setting the pet’s crate on her (no longer) potential boss’s desk.

At an interview for a management position with Avery Dennison, a company that makes packaging and labels, one graduate student answered a non-emergency phone call. Before then, he was a shoo-in for the job, Jonathan Singel, director of talent acquisition for Avery Denison, tells USA TODAY.

Singel blames it on a culture of tweeting and texting that has led to a lack of social skills. Coddling also plays a role.

“It’s (a mindset of) ‘You’re perfect just the way are,'” said Singel.

Helicoptering parents also play a part. Some interviewees reportedly have brought mom or dad along for the interview, with the parents even trying to take part in salary negotiations.

That I’m-special-and-my-opinion-is-seriously-important mentality, which has been inflicted on these kids by bad parents and a worse educational system, won’t survive what’s coming to this country and the rude awakening these kids are getting with the student loan debt and lousy job availability. But in the meantime you can expect a good deal of stuff like you’ll see in this video; namely, kids aiming to record cops behaving badly in order to show how special they are.

That having been said, the kid in this video is doing us a service by showing what goes on at those roadblocks. And if kids like him expose stuff like this, then that my-opinion-is-seriously-important mentality might have some redeeming value after all – particularly if it doesn’t show up where you’re working.

Advertisement

Advertisement

Interested in more national news? We've got you covered! See More National News
Previous Article
Next Article

Trending on The Hayride