This is Officer Todd Groves. Officer Groves has been a patrol officer in our Police Department for six years. He is especially skilled at finding and stopping drunk drivers. There was an excellent article and profile about Officer Groves in last week’s Eden Prairie News.
I can remember the days when drunk driving was thought of was an annoyance, and perhaps a tragedy when the drunk driver hurt or killed an innocent victim. It wasn’t thought of as a serious crime. Maybe just bad judgment. Sometimes unfortunate circumstances. Perhaps just bad luck.
No more. Too many people in this country have been touched by the senseless tragedy that drunk drivers wreak. We no longer think of drunk driving as bad judgment. We think of it as a crime. In fact, it can be a serious crime even if there is no damaged property or injured people in an auto crash. The financial impact alone of a drunk driving conviction is astonishing. Thousands of dollars in legal costs, fines, and even more in insurance costs.
We’re lucky to have people like Officer Groves out there protecting the law abiding driving public from those who cannot get it through their heads that drunk driving is a crime. It’s a serious crime. Clearly, society has upped the ante for this crime. Consequences have been increased in order to make it clear to people that it is a crime that we will no longer tolerate as a mere social faux pas.
Don’t look for the polite police officer to give you a break by asking you to “drive straight home” any more if you are stopped for drunk driving. There’s too much liability in that sort of grace these days. Drunk driving stops these days are by-the-book. And it’s a tough book, indeed.
