Whilst travelling back from the superstore this afternoon, after buying lunch and heading back to the office, I was pulled for a random stop by the police... they were on a campaign to stop drink driving. Fair enough, though it did waste about 15 mins of my time.
I was surprised they were allowed to randomly stop people and demand a breath test without any suspicion (from watching those road wars progs on sky one they usually have to “smell” alcohol on you first) the office assured me that when they have these campaigns then it’s different! Fair enough though I might be interested enough to check this out.
So it got me thinking, putting my political hat on... ( I wished I had asked the officer... though I am sure I can ask the question through official channels later) how many people do they actually catch breaking the law this way, I could count at least six officers standing on the pavement, and there was probably at least one more in the van. I can’t actually believe that this could be the best possible use of the officer’s time. For a start it was the middle of the day, who’s drinking in the middle of the day!! Surely if they had to do these random (no doubt government initiated / driven by targets) campaign then you would do it at 5-7 am catch people who drank far too much the night before or sometime after 7pm when people actually go to the pub!!
But more importantly surely their time would be better spent on intelligent driven campaigns. I mean stopping someone randomly halfway down a dual carriageway, the % of people you stop coming out a pub is going to be statically low, where as parking sort of strategically outside a pub car park and pulling people who you see coming out would statistically give you a much better result! Or even better go back to good old fashioned policing if you see someone doing something that looks dodgy it probably is... what’s that called oh yeah gut instinct!! I’m sure the actual PCs on the ground miss this and loath all the bureaucratic interference.
But on the whole I am still uncomfortable with this method of policing as it targets the law abiding public, and doesn’t help with the perception that it’s easier to increase overall statistics by persecuting the regular guy for some civil wrongdoing, particularly the motorist, rather than focusing on real crime.