Brandon: Home of the snitch

COLIN CORNEAU/BRANDON SUN Enlarge Image

Brandon police Chief Keith Atkinson, Mayor Shari Decter Hirst and Consumer Affairs Minister Gord Mackintosh unveil signs detailing the then-new impaired driving initiative in February 2011.

A new program, encouraging people to call 911 on suspected drunk drivers, has been a huge success in Brandon.

Police told the Sun that they are getting an average of almost one call a day under the program.

I guess that assuages my fears that nervous nellies would be tying up the 911 phone lines with frivolous calls, but there's still something that bothers me, underneath all the statistics.

No, I'm not (all that) worried that Canada is turning into an East-German style Stasi state, where neighbours inform on neighbours. I think it's an important part of your duty as a citizen to step forward and help maintain law and order.

Of course, I also think it's an important part of your duty as a citizen to maintain law and order in a judicious way, using discretion.

I'm sick and tired of hearing about people calling the cops for "teenagers walking through the park in a group" or some such thing. I think it's bad for society when we outsource absolutely every possible potential maybe conflict to armed and armoured police officers.

Save the professionals for the real crimes, and deal with some of the minor stuff on your own.

Because I think, when you opt-out of using your own judgment, and instead decide to call the police, you end up affecting more innocent people than catching guilty people.

Stats provided by the police show that, of the 911 calls they received, when they tracked down the car, less than half the drivers turned out to be impaired.

In fact, police say that between February 2011 (when the program began) and April 2012, they received 671 calls about suspected drunk drivers. Curiously, despite the road signs and media push, only about a third of those calls came to the 911 line, with most of them coming in to the regular, non-emergency police line.

Of those 671 calls, police tracked down 195 vehicles. I'm not going to translate that into an exact "success rate" because obviously multiple calls can come in to report the same vehicle. But it's just as obvious that police aren't able to catch up to all the reported drivers.

The stat that really worries me is that, of the 195 vehicles, reported as suspected drunk drivers, that police were able to find and pull over — only 43 of them led to impaired driving charges.

That's about one in five. In fact, some 78 per cent of all the reported drivers (the ones that police were able to track down) turned out to be blameless.

In the introduction to the program, police said that vehicles they couldn't track down, but had been reported as drunk drivers, would receive a warning letter in the mail — or a visit from uniformed officers.

The police said that 114 letters had been sent out, to suspected impaired drivers. And two dozen people have had a knock at the door, from uniformed officers.

Here's a copy of the letter template, provided to the Sun by the Brandon Police Service.

If the stats hold true, and nearly four in five reported suspects turn out to have been stone-cold sober, then the police sent 89 sternly-worded warning letters to blameless drivers. And 19 people who had nothing to fear had to open the door to police in uniform, warning them that they'd been spotted allegedly doing something wrong.

Imagine how you might feel, getting one of those visits, or one of those letters, but having done nothing wrong. Although the letter clearly states you won't be charged with a crime, and although it clearly says it won't affect your insurance, what about the next time you're pulled over?

Does it stay on your file? Will officers who recognize you, or police who run your license plate feel a little bit like "Oh, there's one of the ones who got away"?

One hundred and eight Brandonites have to worry about that, now.

Interestingly, I think one of the unintended takeaways here is just how willing Brandon residents are to "snitch" on their neighbours.

Not only do the bulk of the calls seemingly turn out to be unfounded, we're a heck of a lot quicker to pick up the phone in the first place.

In Saskatchewan, where this program is also running, Saskatoon police credited it for just 137 impaired driving charges in its first year.  And in the first six months of the program's operation in Regina, it led to just 20 charges.

Those cities are each about five times the population of Brandon, but they aren't bringing in five times the number of charges.

That tells me that Brandonites are pretty zealous about calling 911 to report on their fellow citizens.

At first blush, that sounds like a good thing. And maybe it would be — if they weren't wrong more often than not.

I don't want to be the guy who says criminals should get away. But I think any discussion on how effective a policy is should also include a talk about wasted effort or unintended consequences.

Because every time a police officer pulls over a "suspected drunk driver" who turns out to be an innocent, targeted by an overly suspicious person, that's a waste of police time and resources.

Not to mention the poor public relations due to unneeded warning letters or police visits.

I'm happy that the police tracked down and charged more impaired drivers in 2011 than they did in 2010. But drunk driving now is not the scourge it was a few decades ago.

Most people have gotten the message.

It's still something that shouldn't happen. And treating it as a 911 emergency on par with a fire or a hostage-taking may have helped calls spike under this new program.

But I think the rate of "false positives" is high enough that the program deserves a re-think.