Turns out, the TABC agents busting bar patrons for being drunk in Texas bars weren’t even using breath tests:

The Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission is launching an internal affairs investigation over a public intoxication bust late last month in Irving. The probe results from complaints against TABC officers in raids on bars, and News 8 has obtained videotapes of some of those raids.

One man was pulled from an Irving restaurant on March 10 after an undercover agent watched him and suspected him of public intoxication, or PI. Now he’s a suspect.

“We give them a field sobriety test. There are three field sobriety tests,” said TABC officer Lt. Sonja Pendergast.
The test is critical, because not all TABC officers have breathalyzers to measure blood alcohol. So this is the test that puts people in jail.

In the March raids, some suspects were unaware why they were being taken from the bar.
Bartenders who watched the process are skeptical.

The TABC admits charging public intoxication without measuring blood alcohol is based on judgment. But the public intoxication law, as it is now written, does not require measuring blood alcohol.

“It’s against the law to be intoxicated in a public place. Not everyone likes it, not everyone agrees with it. A bar is a public place, It is against the law to be intoxicated there,” said Pendergast.

Of course, breath tests have their own problems. But field sobriety tests are a fraud. Last fall, the Washington Post looked into the history of those tests, tracing them back to a single, unscientific 1977 study of 238 poorly-sampled students. The woman who created that study managed to sell NHTSA on its merits, and has since made a bundle as it has been adopted by police departments across the country. The Post administered the tests to a sampling of stone-sober pedestrians in D.C., and found many of them failed. That would have been enough to get those people arrested in Texas for public intoxication.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 19th, 2006 at 11:29 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Alcohol, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.