Opinion & Commentary
The great drink-driving scandal: Police road blitzes are wasteful and an affront to our liberties
Over the last Labour Day weekend in NSW, 106,396 people were apprehended by the police in a major operation lasting 72 hours. Of these, 105,950 (99.6 per cent) were found to be innocent and were released; just 446 wrong-doers were charged.
Now we read in The Age that the Victorian Police aims to do much the same thing - more than one hundred thousand Victorians will be targeted this month, even though we know in advance that nearly all of them will turn out to be innocent.
Why is there no public outcry about these extraordinary police operations? The explanation is that the citizens caught up in them are motorists. Selected randomly at police road blocks, they are required to give breath tests as part of police campaigns against drink-driving.
Let us immediately acknowledge that driving while drunk recklessly endangers other people’s lives and should be heavily penalised by the law. Let us also accept that random breath-testing probably helps reduce the incidence of drink-driving. The real possibility of getting breath-tested is undoubtedly a deterrent. As the Victorian Assistant Police Commissioner, Ray Shuey, assured The Age: “If you are out there drink-driving then you will be caught.”
I will even accept that police road blocks are not that much of an inconvenience. A breath test only takes a couple of minutes, the police are generally civil, and if you have not been drinking you have nothing to worry about.
So what’s the problem?
Well, one factor to think about is the cost. Just look at those numbers again. Over 106,000 people were tested in NSW in just 72 hours. How many officers were deployed to stop and test this number of motorists? The NSW Police cannot tell us, but I reckon that as many as two thousand (about 15 per cent of the total force) were involved.
Is this a sensible use of resources – particularly at a time when other crimes have been going through the roof? Property crime in Australia has doubled in the last thirty years and
violent crime has increased twenty-fold over the same period. Police numbers have not kept up with this explosion in criminal activity - the number of officers available to investigate each crime that gets committed is now lower than at any time in the last hundred years.
So why, when police resources are more stretched than ever before, do police chiefs consider it the most sensible use of their officers’ time to devote thousands of hours weeding out tiny numbers of over-the-limit drivers? Could it be that, overwhelmed by the increase in robberies and assaults, the police are simply settling for easier ‘sitting targets’?
The cost of operations like this is not, however, the main reason for concern. Much more important is the relation between the forces of the State and the individual citizen. Whatever happened to the right of individual citizens in a free society to go about their business without the forces of the law intruding?
It is true that police crack-downs on drink driving can reduce accidents. But that in itself is no justification for this sledgehammer of a policy. Suppose somebody suggested that the police should be allowed to set up barricades in our towns and cities to stop and search thousands of unsuspecting pedestrians. Such a strategy would undoubtedly result in the detection of sizeable numbers of law breakers - shoplifters carrying stolen goods, illegal drug traders, people with guns. But nobody seriously suggests we should do it.
There are three very good reasons why not. First, it would be extremely expensive. Second, it would increase antagonism between the police and the public. And, third, in a free society like ours, it would represent an inappropriate and unacceptable use of police powers. So why do we meekly tolerate comparable operations when they are directed against ordinary motorists?
Governments are constantly expanding their powers. They always insist that new controls, regulations or restrictions are in some way ‘necessary’ - if we are to reduce road accidents, or contain the drugs menace, or eliminate poverty, or fight terrorism, then we have to hand over more control to the agencies of the State.
Sometimes, perhaps, these claims may be justified. But often increased powers are not ‘necessary’ at all, and the benefits to society do not justify the costs involved. Of course the police should keep an eye out for drunken drivers and should arrest them when they see them. But stopping hundreds of thousands of law-abiding citizens in order to detect a few hundred wrong-doers is a blunderbuss of a strategy, and outside of wartime, we should resist any such use of police powers to apprehend people when there is no reason to believe they have broken the law.
The Victorian police intend to give a Christmas card to every motorist they stop this month. I just hope my house doesn’t get burgled before I get home to put it on my mantelpiece.
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About the Author:
Peter Saunders is Director of Social Policy Research programmes at the Centre for Independent Studies.
