Last Updated on: 22nd September 2013, 09:36 am
The Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission has announced that the State has begun
sending undercover police officers into bars to arrest drunk people for being drunk.
According to commission spokesperson Carolyn Beck, the first of the sting operations, which are designed to prevent drunken mishaps before they happen, took place recently in a suburb of Dallas and involved the infiltration of 36 bars and the arrest of 30 people on public intoxication charges.
The brilliant minds behind this idea feel, as Beck puts it, that being in a bar should not, and does not in any way, exempt people from State public drunkenness laws.
“We feel that the only way we’re going to get at the drunk driving problem and the problem of people hurting each other while drunk is by crackdowns like this,” Beck says.
“There are a lot of dangerous and stupid things people do when they’re intoxicated, other than get behind the wheel of a car,” she continued. “For instance, they sometimes decide that it would be a good idea to send undercover agents into drinking establishments for the soul purpose of arresting innocent people, wasting valuable police time and resources in the process.”
Ok, I added that last part in, but so what, I’m sure that most of you were already thinking it anyway. However, Beck did add the following: “People walk out into traffic and get run over, people jump off of balconies trying to reach a swimming pool and miss.”
I’ll give her this much. Sometimes drunk people aren’t the quickest bunnies in the forest, and yes, sometimes they’re pretty dangerous. But I fail to see how that can be used in any way as justification for covertly spying on people and throwing them in jail when the State decides that they’ve had enough of a good time. You would think that it would be much easier to simply increase police presence at bars if alcohol-related issues have really gotten that far out of hand. I’d like to think that that’s what would happen in any similar situation, But maybe it really is true what they say. Everything is bigger in Texas, including the stupidity.
