Don't Drive Drunk on Saturday, in South KC

It will probably be a great Saturday evening for getting your drink on and cruising the roads of Kansas City north of 75th Street, because the Police Department has announced it will be running a DUI checkpoint in South Kansas City, starting at 11.

What does this mean to you? If you drive in South Kansas City, it means you may be accosted by the police without any individualized suspicion of wrongful behavior. If you live elsewhere in Kansas City, you may face blackouts of police coverage, since dozens of officers will be spending hundreds of man-hours to arrest a few buzzed drivers. If you pay taxes in Kansas City, you will simply have your tax dollars wasted in an effort that is more about misguided PR ("We're a police state, and we can interfere with you whenever and wherever we like" being the PR message) than about saving lives.

If, by chance, you or a loved one is killed because some drunk moron blows through a red light, well, the police will respond to the scene when they get around to it. They'll be busy delivering a PR message in South Kansas City.

Update on the Wrongheadedness of DUI Checkpoints

When I wrote yesterday of the foolishness of numerous cops spending untold tax dollars stopping and delaying hundreds of motorists last Friday night to catch 7 allegedly intoxicated drivers, I didn't realize how bad it was.

Over at the always informative Capt. Spaulding's World (a newsy blog), I learned that "Meanwhile that same night- several police patrol zones were "blacked out"- or had no cars available to run calls."

Can you believe that insanity? While hundreds of innocent citizens were experiencing an unwelcome, warrantless, probable-cause-free, police intrusion into their evening, other citizens who actually needed police services were left as voices crying in the wilderness.

Not a nickle more for the wasteful Police Department until it stops wasting our tax dollars!

Not a nickle more for the wasteful Police Department until it uses the money we do giv it to protect citizens instead of hassling them.

Hire Cops Instead of Hassling Hundreds of Citizens

Not a nickle more for the wasteful Police Department until it stops wasting our tax dollars!

The Police Department claims there's no way that it can live up to the promise to hire 20 new cops this year.

Yet buried in the paper on Saturday was this little item:

Kansas City police arrest 7 for DUI at checkpoint

KANSAS CITY | DUI arrests

During a sobriety checkpoint late Friday and early Saturday, Kansas City police made 7 DUI arrests and arrested two other people for other unspecified traffic violations.

Police stopped a total of 286 vehicles from 11 p.m. Friday to 4 a.m. Saturday near the intersection of Ward Parkway and Wornall Road, according to a press release.

Karen Dillon

How many cops worked how many hours for those seven arrests? I'll guess 10 or so, probably more. How many hours of paperwork went into it, before and after? Were any of those hours paid at an overtime rate? 5 hours of checkpoint means at least a full 8 hour shift, maybe more. Ignoring the prospect of overtime pay, I'm willing to bet they blew over 80 hours of cop time on 7 arrests and 279 needless hasslings of law-abiding citizens, with attendant delay for those unlucky saps. More than 10 hours per arrest, and if they eliminated two checkpoints a month, they would save the equivalent of a new cop.

I personally think that DUI checkpoints are a warrantless unreasonable search and seizure conducted without probably cause, but the courts disagree with me. Regardless of their legality, though, they remain a singularly intrusive and ineffective waste of resources for a department that cries about underfunding.