Impaired: The drunk driver profiled
Jeff Green
The Spec
(Fri Sep 30 2011)
It's the elephant in the bar.
You have a couple of drinks after work with the office crew. One drink turns into a few. A few turns into a few more. Someone reaches for their car keys to go home, and nobody says anything. Hamilton police say the typical drunk driver is the after-work drinker. And MADD Canada suggests that type of drinker comes out more as the fall sports season kicks off.
Within the past two weeks, a 20-year-old Hamilton student was killed in a hit and run, which police allege involved a drunk driver. And in Niagara, officers conducting a R.I.D.E. program for the annual wine festival earlier this month stopped 2,100 vehicles and charged five drivers with impaired driving or over 80 milligrams - or blowing over .08 in a breathalyzer test that measures your blood alcohol level. Patrol officers nabbed seven more during the campaign. But when it comes to men after work - and there is a clear male bias in impaired driving arrest statistics - police say many don't realize a pint of beer is more than one "drink."
Four pints in two hours is more alcohol than a six pack. With that much, a drinker is likely to blow in the "warn range" - 50 mg of alcohol in 100 millilitres of blood, in Ontario. It carries a minimum three-day roadside suspension. The legal limit is in Canada is .08. At over 80 mg, it's a criminal offence with a minimum 90-day roadside suspension, and a one-year licence suspension on conviction. In Hamilton, men made up 83 per cent of impaired driving arrests in the past 12 months. And the majority of those - 80 per cent - are first-time offenders.
"These aren't people that are just heavy drinkers," said Sergeant Claus Wagner, traffic safety co-ordinator for the Hamilton police. "They're just average people that don't understand it. You had too much. (They think) 'I don't want to leave the car, it's embarrassing' or whatever and they drive home." Of the 507 impaired driving arrests in Hamilton from September 2010 to August 2011, 57 per cent of drivers were nabbed before the bars closed at 2 a.m. And they haven't just had a few - on average, they're blowing .17, or more than twice the legal limit.
Hamilton police say the majority of those getting busted fall into two distinct age groups - 25-34-year-olds make up the largest, while the 45-54 set comes in a very close second. In 2010, the two groups only differed by seven arrests for men. Out of seven age ranges, those two groups made up 47 per cent of the impaired driving arrests.
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