‘PEOPLE JUST KEEP MAKING REALLY POOR DECISIONS’
Police trying to move the dial on impaired driving
As soon as he saw the call, Curtis Warnar knew it wasn’t one of the run-of-the-mill traffic situations he responds to every day.
A constable in his ninth year with the Regina Police Service and fifth year with the traffic unit, Warnar was doing speed enforcement on Sherwood Drive the morning of Sept. 27 when another officer sent him a message to tell him to take a look at the 907 — the police code for impaired driving — that had just come in.
A man was sitting in the driver’s seat of his vehicle, arguing with his children who he was trying to drive to school.
“No Dad,” the children could be heard saying. “Please don’t drive. Please don’t drive.”
Warnar flipped on his lights and
sirens to get to the Elphinstone Street scene quickly, and pulled his car in front of the man’s vehicle while another officer pulled in behind. Warnar told the man to turn off the engine, reached in and ripped the keys out of the ignition, smelling stale alcohol as he did and spying an open bottle on the floor of the car.
The man was incoherent enough that officers had to help him out of the vehicle. As they made their way to the cruiser, he fell flat on his face.
The ride to police cells was mostly quiet, Warnar recalls, but at some point, the man realized what he had nearly done. “Did I really do that?” he asked Warnar.
While no one was physically injured and there wasn’t even a crash, Warnar’s re-telling of the call on social media made it one of Regina’s most high-profile drunk driving incidents in recent years.
“The first thing that stuck with me was trying to understand someone’s decision-making process how you would put your kids in a potentially fatal situation,” says Warnar.
“And the other part of it is how we continue to get the message out that we need to stop. It’s 110 per cent preventable, and people just keep making really poor decisions, whether it’s two or three drinks or a situation like that where you’re four times the legal limit.”
It’s no secret Saskatchewan has the worst drunk-driving rates in the country. As a province in 2015, police reported 575 incidents of impaired driving per 100,000 people, by far the highest rate in the country (Alberta was second at 314 per 100,000). Regina and Saskatoon were better than the provincial average, but still had some of the highest rates among Canadian cities. Regina was third with 306 incidents per 100,000 and Saskatoon was sixth at 225 per 100,000. In 2016, 57 people died and 464 people were injured in the 1,100 collisions where alcohol or drugs were a factor.
And for almost every impaired driver, there is an excuse that comes with it.
“I only had two beer.”
“I live right near here.”
“I’m actually a better driver after having a couple than most people are sober.”
“I just had to zip back to the party to grab my cellphone.” “Drunk? I’m not drunk!” Patrick Barbar figures he has dealt with between 700 and 800 drunk drivers over the course of his 19 years with the Saskatoon Police Service. What the veteran officer — who was recently promoted to staff sergeant and put in charge of the force’s traffic division — finds most surprising is how similarly most of them behaved.
Barbar says the majority of impaired drivers who find themselves staring red-eyed into a police officer’s flashlight go through a compressed version of what the Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross described as the five stages of grief. An impaired driving investigation, Barbar says, invariably begins with denial.
“It’s almost like a kid getting caught with his hand in a cookie jar, where they know they’re caught and they don’t have the wherewithal to lie their way out of it, so they just deny. It’s the goto. The default position,” he says.
Once it becomes clear the officer isn’t buying it, denial — which sometimes shifts from “I didn’t have anything to drink” to “OK, well, I had a couple” but never “I’ve had about 10” — shifts to anger, Barbar says. Sometimes it’s a personal attack on the officer, he continued, and sometimes it’s the tired question, “Don’t you have anything better to do?”
Next comes the bargaining — the excuses. The most common refrain, Barbar explains, goes something along the lines of: “I’m two blocks from home. Can’t you just let me go?” As if, the veteran officer says, that makes driving drunk any more permissible. Then they inevitably start negotiating — “Please, I’ve got kids,” “I need my licence for work,” “What else am I supposed to do?”
Once the handcuffs are on and the cruiser is headed back to the station and its cells, the cycle collapses into its fourth and fifth stages — depression and acceptance. Barbar says it’s far from uncommon for suspects to shed tears in the back seat of the car as the gravity of their predicament reveals itself.
Very rarely, there’s another response.
A couple of years ago, Const. Anthony Rodier arrested and charged a man who was seen weaving across the centre line along Dewdney Avenue in Regina. A few days later, Rodier got a call from the man, a typical occurrence as many of those charged like to dispute an officer’s version of events.
This man, though, did something entirely unexpected. He apologized.
“He read the report how he was swerving in traffic, almost hitting others. All this stuff, he told me didn’t really think about the whatifs when he did it,” says Rodier.
“If more people had that reaction to getting charged with impaired driving, we’d be much safer on the streets.”
Sadly, that isn’t the case for most. There are multiple-time drunk drivers in the province still who haven’t learned even after being charged, causing a crash or worse.
“What’s happening,” Barbar says, “is people aren’t planning ahead. If you look at our PSAs or our social media, they say plan before you go. By the time you’re at the bar, it’s too late to figure it out. That’s what people are failing to do, and it’s a failure to plan that leads to disaster.”
Warnar said one plan is simple: Don’t bring your car if you’re going somewhere you will be drinking.
There’s no real target demographic for police to work with, either. Drunk driving isn’t just old or young, men or women. And socioeconomic lines don’t tell us much. During the summer, says Warnar, they will catch more young people out partying, but this time of year they see more older professionals going between Christmas parties.
“If you have to ask yourself ‘Am I OK to drive?’ ” says Warnar, “you’re not.” FRIDAY: WEYBURN PROGRAM AIMS TO KEEP DRUNKS OFF THE ROADS