Picture this: it’s a beautiful summer day, the sun is shining, you’re feeling good, you’re looking to do something fun, so of course you go to the racetrack to wager on the ponies.
You check the stats in the program for the first post, and you notice that the 1 horse has 500 races but zero wins. Probably not putting any money on him. You check the 2 horse and notice that he has 1,697 races, but also has zero wins. Probably not putting any money on him either, right?
Because that would be silly. A waste of time and money. Just like police RIDE checks; a waste of time and money.
Let me first back up a second and be extremely clear that impaired driving is bad. Impaired drivers killed 49 people in Canada in 2023, which is a genuine tragedy. Drug overdoses, by comparison, killed 8,030 people in Canada in 2023, which is a tragedy several orders of magnitude greater.
Which is why I find it odd that such an enormous amount of police resources are still being funneled towards the RIDE program, when the opioid epidemic is the much greater crisis of our generation.
Let’s back up once again, though. The RIDE program (which stands for Reduce Impaired Driving Everywhere) started back in 1977 as a way to crack down on drunk driving. Because back then, drunk driving was pretty normalised behaviour. The Boomer generation absolutely loved getting tanked and crashing their giant Impalas and Eldorados into trees. Millennials much less so, and Gen Z practically not at all.
The Canadian Centre of Substance Abuse has breathalyser sample statistics going back decades, which shows that rates of impaired driving have been dropping dramatically. In 1995, a whopping 18.7 percent of roadside breathalyser samples were still coming back positive for alcohol. However, by 2014 that number had plummeted to just 4 percent. Today, it’s even lower.
Which is what brings me back to the numbers from the beginning of this column, and the aforementioned horses which you would never bet on.
I’m way more concerned about distracted driving and all the people who drive around while texting
This week, with people across Niagara ringing in the new year, the local police set up their usual RIDE checks. More than 500 vehicles were stopped, which resulted in a grand total of… zero charges for impaired driving. On Canada Day last year, Niagara Region Police set up RIDE checks and stopped three times as many cars, a full 1,697 vehicles all in, which resulted in a grand total of… again, zero impaired driving charges.
I’m not the Police Chief, but if I was, and I was looking at my resources and trying to best decide how to deploy them in order to save the most lives, I’d be taking a long hard look at the RIDE checks which catch zero criminals, and asking myself if this was a wise way to expend hundreds of hours of officers’ time.
As a citizen, impaired driving is not the crime that keeps me awake at night. Impaired driving is not even the vehicular crime that worries me the most; I’m way more concerned about distracted driving and all the people who drive around while texting.
Even drunk driving is, on a deeper level, more of a mental health problem than anything else. A statistical majority of impaired driving offences categorised as “severe” — when someone was injured or killed — involve a repeat offender, which means it involved someone with a dependency or addiction issue.
If we spent money and resources on addiction counselling and recovery programs, we’d be attacking the root cause of impaired driving, which would, I’d wager, save a lot more lives.
But instead, we keep putting our money on the long shot, and hoping that drunk drivers will randomly stumble into a RIDE checkpoint, despite the odds suggesting otherwise.
James Culic always takes an Uber if he’s been drinking, and his mom donated to MADD every single year. Find out how to yell at him at the bottom of the page, or send a sharp letter to the editor.
