Terrible. I hope this wasn't exarcerbated by a high-speed pursuit.
"The suspect was asked to pull over at a sobriety check point and instead sped away from a police car. He smashed through a police barricade and then plowed down people, some of them lined up outside a nightclub, over a span of two blocks."
I'm not anti-checkpoint or anything.
Why do you feel a study is needed in order to form an opinion on this? What logical arguments would you make against sobriety checkpoints?
In any case, turns out that at least one study has been performed. This was just the first google search hit. There's probably more out there.
[1] http://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/impaired_driving/check...
http://www.scpr.org/news/2014/01/06/41411/california-drunk-d...
BTW my "common sense" says that sobriety checkpoints DO reduce drunk driving and fatal accidents. I'm not any kind of DUI checkpoint denier.
It works here, a lot of people are preferring a cab over the car to go out to places they know they will drink.
The original distinction, in Texas, was between arresting someone for driving drunk and arresting them for another crime discovered during a sobriety checkpoint. The first was legal, the second was not. However, in Lujan, the Texas Criminal Court of Appeals ruled that the latter was acceptable.
Should it? Is baseless conjecture informed by essentially no facts, in the echo of a just-happened tragedy, ever useful?
I am going to say no, it is never useful. Many misinformed words are spilled, blame is heartily doled out liberally and easily by keyboard warriors, and everyone feels like they've done the world some good, when they've done nothing of the sort.
Sorry if this comes across as overly cynical, but with barely a couple of posts in, the blame has been casually blamed on high-speed pursuits (no evidence of one, but throw it in there regardless), sobriety checkpoints (in response to a freak incident in a nation with 11,000 impaired driving deaths yearly)...and restrictions on Uber. I expect a Thanks, Obama to appear soon enough.
Don't follow FOX news style "who's to blame!?" thought processes.
"Police said the incident started when an officer on a drunken-driving patrol tried to stop the silver Toyota sedan at a gas station a few blocks away. The car took off, weaving between parked cars then driving at high speed the wrong way down a one-way street.
The driver rammed through police barriers — three wooden pieces held up by metal poles — set up on Red River Street on the northeast edge of the entertainment district. It'd had been packed with revelers just minutes earlier, but officials had cleared the area to create a fire lane."