You know why the Feds care? MADD. They are an ENORMOUS lobby that have pushed their will to the highest level. I understand where they came from...mothers that were against drunk driving. However, they have morphed into a special interest group that would re-instate prohibition if they could I believe. Don't get me wrong, I loved working DUI taskforce. We would go out and hunt for drunk/dangerous drivers. I find drunks because they do not need to be behind the wheel (notwithstanding the prevalent opinion here). They are not always bad people, most are just regular people who made a poor choice. What I hated about it was the money aspect of it. Say I would work 6 hours of DUI after my regular 8.5 hrs shift. In that 6 hrs, for every hour I was not dealing with a DUI, I was to write 3 tickets. I was to turn in copies of those tickets every night as proof. So if I had 2 DUI's that took 2 hrs each (that is being quite productive) but had 2 hrs of down time, I would get chewed out if I did not have 6 tickets to turn in, regardless of how productive my DUI hunt was. They said they wanted to make sure we work stopping cars looking for drunks (I can understand that). My question was why can I not write warnings as proof of activity and not tickets, still doing the same work but not bringing down the hammer to drivers if I so choose. The response was that we do not give warnings...only tickets. They would yell at us for writing State code rather than local code on the tickets. If I wrote a ticket using the local code, the City gets the funds. If I wrote a ticket using State codes, the State gets the funds...I never wrote City codes
. Sadly, I no longer go drunk hunting. The fun was sucked out of it by the number crunchers. I was/am still quite good at DUI's. I still find a few here and there on day shift.
