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This week on Weird and Wacky Wednesdays: Practice What You Preach

Last week our subjects made plans. Elaborate ones, in a couple of cases, and every plan made the situation worse than doing nothing would have.

This week nobody needed a plan. Each person in this column already knew the rule. One of them was driving around with the rule printed on a licence plate. One of them spends a working life applying rules to other people. One of them is sworn to enforce them. Knowing the rule turns out to be a very different thing from following it, and in one case knowing the rule almost helped.

The plate

On Saturday, August 8, Arizona DPS troopers stopped a pickup truck on Route 66 near Flagstaff. The reason for the stop was a broken taillight, which is about as ordinary as a traffic stop gets.

Troopers said they noticed signs of impairment as soon as they reached the window. The driver admitted to drinking and driving. A blood alcohol test came back at 2.5 times the legal limit.

The vanity plate on the truck carried an anti drunk driving message. DPS released a photograph of it along with a one line summary of the whole affair: “A lesson in practice what you preach.”

The driver has not been named and faces a charge of driving impaired. The allegations have not been proven in court.

The judge

At about six in the morning on September 9, police in Seocho-gu, Seoul, received a report from a member of the public about a vehicle that appeared to be driven by an impaired person. Officers located the vehicle and the driver.

The driver is a sitting judge of the Seoul High Court. Korean reporting does not name the judge, in keeping with local practice, and refers to them only as Judge A. Seoul Seocho Police Station is investigating under the Road Traffic Act. The reported blood alcohol concentration was at the level that brings a licence suspension. Nobody was hurt. No charge has been laid, the investigation is ongoing, and nothing has been proven.

The officer in the parked truck

At around five in the morning on August 16, Key West police found an off duty officer of their own department sitting in the driver’s seat of his parked white Ford pickup.

Officer Dustin Christina, 40, was asked how much he had to drink. He said, “I had a few.” He then said he had not driven the truck to that spot. According to the arrest report he put it this way: “I didn’t do anything. I’m f—ing waiting for someone to get me and then they left and now I’m waiting.”

Officers described a blank stare, bloodshot and watery eyes, a flushed face and the odour of alcohol. They said that when he got out of the truck he stumbled backward into it and pushed himself off with his legs, then tried to close the driver’s door, missed, and stumbled away from the vehicle.

They also said that a couple of hours earlier they had seen him driving the truck around the corner from Greene Street onto Ann Street, and that a woman had to run up onto the curb to avoid being struck.

Asked to perform sobriety tests, he declined. His reason, per the report, was this: “Nah, I’m not doing it. I’m sitting here in a non-running vehicle.” He was arrested. 

Those who should know better 

A driver who was advertising the rule. A judge who applies rules for a living. An officer who enforces them. All three are presumed innocent, and the judge has not been charged best I can tell.

But none of them was short of information. Whatever ends up being proven, the thing that was missing was never the knowledge. It was the twenty seconds between knowing a thing and doing it, which is what most of this column has been about since the start. 

Practice what you preach. Hypocrisy is always fodder for Weird and Wacky Wednesdays.