Law enforcement officials come up with some pretty interesting ideas to raise awareness of drunk driving these days. From printed coasters left in bars to remind drinkers to call a cab, to the creative ads plastered on billboards during March Madness, it’s always interesting to see what they’ll come up with next. So when we saw this cop car from Glendale, California, painted to look like half a taxi and half a cop car to remind people that they need to be careful which ride they choose.
If there’s one thing you can rely on the Michigan State Police for, it’s the fact that when something potentially bad happens that could affect police departments in Michigan, they don’t hunker down and pretend it isn’t happening. They grab it by the horns and fight. It was like that when there were allegations of corruption in the Detroit Forensic Lab, which resulted in an investigation by MSP and a scathing report that got that crime lab shuttered for good. And now that there’s a possibility of corruption by a third party vendor tasked with servicing Datamaster breath testing machines across the state. (Which are the machines that some people call ‘Breathalyzers.) It seems some of the data documenting the servicing of breath test machines around the state is faulty…
A recent important case has set the tone for other, future DUI cases in Michigan after a Lansing district court judge threw out a guilty verdict because the prosecutor didn’t disclose information that might have helped the defendant. This is called exculpatory evidence. It all started back in November of 2018, when 43-year-old Patrick Reynolds of Grand Rapids hit a pole with his car near an intersection in Lansing, Michigan. It was about 2 am, and he had just left the bar and was driving home when he lost control of his vehicle and struck the pole in Ingham County.
For most people, when we think of the holidays, we think of giving gifts to loved ones, decorating the Christmas tree, and spending time with family. What we rarely think about is a ride in a cop car, a lonely stint in the local jail, and criminal charges. And yet for many people, that’s exactly what happens! Because believe it or not, drunk driving and drugged driving arrests rise sharply around the holidays.
Drunk driving accounts for hundreds of thousands of arrests every year, all over the country. Here in Michigan, more than 35,000 people are arrested for DUIs every year. That’s a lot of people being pulled over and subjected to breath tests, roadside sobriety tests, and eventually blood work. But what if right off the bat, the data is wrong? What if you get pulled over and breath-tested by the cops, but the Breathalyzer machine (or the Datamaster, which is what we use here in Michigan) is wrong? Will you end up wrongfully accused of being drunk behind the wheel when you’re not? Maybe…
Welcome back to this interesting and, let’s be honest, somewhat alarming discussion about “auto-brewery syndrome.” If you recall from the previous article, it’s a medical condition where, courtesy of an imbalance of yeast or bacteria in the digestive tract, a person’s gut produces ethanol from carbohydrates they eat. And since ethanol is what intoxicates you when you drink alcohol, you don’t have to think hard to imagine the results. (That’s right – you end up drunk when you’ve had nothing to drink and should be stonecold sober!)
Usually, when someone gets pulled over for drunk driving and they swear they’re sober but their BAC reading comes back above above the legal limit, you can safely make a few assumptions. Either: one: they’re lying, or two: the preliminary breath test results (PBT) are wrong. Maybe the person is hoping their denial will work and the cop will let them go, or maybe the cop forgot to properly calibrate his preliminary breath test machine.
Halloween may be the scariest time of the year, but you can forget about ghosts, hobgoblins, and witches for real frights – because nothing is scarier than these Michigan DUI facts! People may think that New Years Eve and St. Patrick’s Day are the only times the drunk driving stats get really terrifying, but that’s a myth (just like the headless horseman!) In Livingston County, Eaton County or Clinton County, Halloween is equally frightening when it comes to the number of people injured and even killed in fright-night crashes!
Cops are people too, and that means many of them enjoy a good laugh just as much as the next person and appreciate a bit of levity or a good joke to lighten a rough day. But there are times and places where mucking about is totally appropriate, and times when it’s best just to follow protocol and not try to inject your own personal brand of humor into a situation. And the roadside sobriety test is a pretty good example of one of those times.
Teaching is a tough job these days. Teachers are often underpaid, underappreciated, and overwhelmed. But regardless of how rough the job gets, there are certain coping methods that school districts usually frown on. And one of those is drinking on the job. But that didn’t stop Michael Dennis Fletcher from showing up drunk to teach his class at Lakeland High School. And not just “drunk” – this guy’s BAC was almost off the charts!
