In January 2007, state police in Illinois seized a shiny new, souped-up Dodge Charger after arresting the car’s owner on drunk driving charges. The state apparently passed a law in 2006 that allows police to take and keep the cars of repeat drunk driving offenders.

But this car didn’t get auctioned off, as often happens in seizure cases. Instead, it was given to Ronald Cooley, head of the State Police Merit Board. The Merit Board oversees state police hirings, firings, discipline, and promotions.

According to the A.P., Cooley “drives the Charger between his office and Petersburg home, for local work assignments and for a handful of out-of-town state business trips.” The A.P. says other police officials may be driving seized luxury vehicles, too.

The transfer also raises questions about how the department uses nearly two dozen other vehicles the police have seized, including a 2003 Cadillac Escalade, a 2004 Audi Quattro and a 2005 GMC Sierra. The agency refused to tell the AP who drives those vehicles, citing the possibility that it would jeopardize officer safety.

Compton said there’s nothing improper about handing over the sports car to the director of an agency that administers state troopers’ hiring, firing and discipline. Cooley agreed.

“It’s not a situation where I’d do anything for them or they for me,” Cooley said. “It helped our budget and they had something they couldn’t use.”

I have a piece up at Reason taking swipes at Chuck Hurley, MADD’s CEO and Obama’s nominee to head up the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Walter Olson also has much more on Hurley, as does this Washington Times editorial, which includes more detail on Hurley’s advocacy for red light cameras:

Mr. Hurley is a former board member of the National Campaign to Stop Red Light Running. The innocuous-sounding outfit frequently testifies at congressional hearings as if it were a nonprofit victim’s advocacy group. In reality, it is a well-heeled lobbying shop for big business.

The so-called National Campaign’s phone number - (202) 828-9100 - is answered by a receptionist at the public-relations firm Blakey and Agnew. Among that firm’s big-ticket clients are the traffic-camera companies Redflex Traffic Systems of Australia, Gastometer BV of the Netherlands and Lasercraft Inc. of Britain. These foreign corporations all seek to rewrite state laws to allow machines to issue traffic-camera tickets, thus reaping huge profits for the companies that operate them - including Redflex, Gastometer and Lasercraft.

Last August, I described how the campaign recruited Ladies’ Home Journal to solicit letters to Congress from its readers calling for more red light cameras, without ever disclosing that red light camera manufacturers had underwritten the entire thing.

President Obama has nominated Mothers Against Drunk Driving CEO Chuck Hurley to head up the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

Hurley is a lifelong anti-alcohol activist. MADD’s top priority during his stint as CEO was to get states to pass a law mandating ignition interlock devices in the cars of all first-time DWI offenders. The device requires you to blow into a tube before starting your car, then blow again at set intervals as you’re driving. Under Hurley’s watch, MADD also gave a “qualified endorsement” for bills in the New York and New Mexico legislatures that would have required the devices in all cars sold in those states.

Hurley and MADD have a long history of manipulating data to support their policy initiatives. Last year, for example, I explained how a MADD report looking at DWI fatality statistics miraculously came to the conclusion that the numbers in each state–whether up, down, or unchanged–spoke to the urgent need to adopt MADD’s ignition interlock law. Hurley and MADD were at the heart of the effort to force the states to adopt the .08 minimum blood alcohol standard under penalty of withdrawing federal highway funds, and weren’t at all afraid to invoke dubious statistics to push their position. Hurley has aggressively pushed for the use of constitutionally-questionable roadblock sobriety checkpoints to enforce the new standard, even though there’s now good reason to believe the use of roadblocks have actually made the roads more dangerous. Don’t be at all surprised to see Hurley use his position at NHTSA to push for a federal interlock law as well. MADD’s goals are now NHTSA’s.

But Hurley isn’t just a zealot on alcohol. His default position seems to be in favor of more highway safety laws, more regulations, and more reasons to stop and fine motorists. Hurley has pushed states to adopt primary seat belt laws, which in addition to being a questionable use of law enforcement resources (people who don’t wear seat belts aren’t a threat to anyone other than themselves), have been criticized in some quarters for giving police officers another tool to engage in racial profiling, or as a pretext stop in asset forfeiture cases. Hurley has also supported the proliferation of red light cameras, despite studies showing they actually cause more accidents than they prevent.

At the Detroit Free Press, longtime automotive writer Eric Peters lays out what Hurley’s NHTSA agenda might look like:

…drivers can expect a ratcheting up of the low-grade harassment they already endure on a daily basis—in the form of more obnoxious regulations, pullover “safety” checks and very possibly lowered speed limits…

The legal standard for “drunk” driving has already been lowered to .08 BAC—a level well below the .10 and up level at which people have actual accidents as opposed to running afoul of “sobriety checkpoints.”

But even that isn’t enough. Under Hurley, MADD has been pushing to have the legal threshold reduced to .04 BAC, which would turn anyone who had a glass of wine over dinner into a “drunk driver” as far as the law was concerned—and subject them to penalties more severe than those applied to many violent felons…

As NHTSA head, expect him to push MADD’s current agenda as far as he can—including mandatory in-car alcohol detectors for everyone, not just those already convicted of DWI. And controversial “sobriety checkpoints” that stop random cars and subject their drivers to Gestapo-like stop and frisks are likely to sprout up in irban and suburban areas across the country.
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At the National Safety Council, Hurley campaigned for mandatory air bags and “primary enforcement” seat belt laws on the public, which ironically diverted state and local law enforcement away from catching drunk and reckless drivers and turned them into ubiquitous snoops of the nanny state.

Mandatory air bags—which add thousands of dollars to the price/lifetime ownership costs of every new car—have arguably helped undermine the car industry by making new cars much more expensive and thus less affordable to consumers as well as less profitable to sell.

As head of NHTSA, Hurley will wield immense power. Obama administration insiders expect he will order states and cities to install thousands of new photo radar and red light cameras, and to make a major push for a “pay as you go” driving tax—with mandatory GPS transponders for every vehicle, so Uncle Sam can keep track of where, when and how much you drive—and send you a bill accordingly.

That’s change you can believe in. Let the good times roll!

Another terrific video by Caleb Brown and Austin Bragg.

Another shining moment for government paternalism.

Last week, I posted a story about how the state of Pennsylvania is spending $170,000 in taxpayer money to train the employees of its state-owned wine and liquor stores to be nice to their customers. It’s a relatively tiny amount of money, but still a bizarre expenditure given the state’s massive deficit, and the fact Pennsylvania has a government monopoly on the sale of wine and spirits.

New development: The president of the consulting firm that won the contract is married to a high-ranking official with the state’s liquor control board (his wife is one of the state’s three regional managers). Liquor board officials insist there’s nothing improper about the contract.

A Chicago police officer who has won praise for having among the most DWI arrests in the city is now under investigation for lying about one of his stops.

The video from top DUI cop Joe D. Parker’s squad car shows a man walking a straight line, without stumbling or flailing his arms.

But Parker, a Chicago Police officer who has won acclaim for being among the leading DUI enforcers in the state, told a different story in his police report.

He wrote that Raymond L. Bell lost his balance and used his arms to steady himself. And he arrested the 33-year-old Oak Lawn man on charges of driving under the influence, speeding and negligent driving.

Now, after reviewing the squad-car video, Cook County prosecutors have dropped the July 2008 charges against Bell.

Parker is the second top Chicago DWI cop to get caught lying. The city had to drop 156 DWI cases after Officer John Haleas was caught lying about one of them. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, Parker himself was arrested for drunk driving in 1996. The charge was later dropped.

I’ve written before about the problems with the use of boilerplate on DWI reports. The story also reinforces the importance of video to check against police misconduct.

Most retail outfits catch on to the “be courteous to your customers” thing pretty early on. But most retail outlets don’t have a government-enforced monopoly on what they sell. So in Pennsylvania, where all liquor and wine must be sold in state-run stores…

The state’s Liquor Control Board is spending more than $173,000 to try to make workers friendlier and more well-mannered at the nearly 650 stores it operates. The board says it wants to make sure clerks are saying “hello,” “thank you” and “come again” to customers shopping for wine and spirits.

It has hired Pittsburgh-based consulting firm Solutions 21 to help coach store managers so they can instruct their clerks on issues such as how to greet customers and where to stand. Training begins this month.