Memorial Day provides weekend warriors the three-day weekend to remember those who died while serving our country. However, as the unofficial kick-off to summer, it also provides three full days to barbeque and indulge in some pre-summer drinks.
If you happen to be in Illinois, you could earn yourself a cool $100 for reporting a drunk driver. Or you could find yourself the target of a DUI investigation because someone else thought they could make an easy $100.
Chicago’s WBBM’s Steve Miller reported that, this Memorial Day weekend, the Alliance Against Intoxicated Motorist (AAIM) will be paying tipsters $100 for reporting a drunk driver in the state of Illinois.
“The tragic consequences are heartbreaking when somebody decides to get into a car and they think that they’re OK to drive. And they’re not,” said Rita Kreslin, the executive director of the AAIM. “We have paid out over $486,000. That’s 4,866 people that have been drinking and driving that have been removed from the roadways.”
She also said AAIM has taken some criticism for this approach, but “the majority of those people are probably the same people that would drink and drive and not think twice about it.”
Sorry Rita, not true.
I’m giving this approach flak because it creates the possibility of innocent people being stopped and investigated for drunk driving. How many people were reported who weren’t drunk? How many people will be stopped simply because it was a possibility that the tipster be paid $100? Unfortunately, I can’t answer these questions.
More importantly, how many of the tipsters actually know that a driver is drunk? This one, however, I can answer.
None.
Forget tipsters making completely false reports. Let’s say there is a reason for the tip. Tipsters will be reporting mistakes in driving, not drunk driving. And we all know there is a multitude of reasons why someone can make a mistake in driving other than intoxication. But that’s not going to matter, is it? With a $100 incentive, driving error equals drunk.
Fortunately, we’re all the way over here in California and about 1,700 miles away from AAIM’s incentivized witch-hunt. But it begs the question: Does the tip even give the officers the authority to pull someone over when they, themselves, saw nothing that would indicate a DUI?
Unfortunately, in California (…and the rest of the country) the answer is yes.
Recall my colleague, Lawrence Taylor’s post http://www.duiblog.com/2014/04/23/anonymous-tips-now-enough-to-stop-drivers-for-dui/
The United States Supreme Court recently held that an anonymous tip is sufficient to justify a police stop for the purpose of investigating a DUI even though there is no way to verify the truth or reliability of the anonymous tip.
So much for the 4th amendment and probable cause. And in Illinois, people actually get paid for their participation in the undermining the Constitution!
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