No. It does not deter drunk driving
Police boards and governments should stop the savagery of online public shaming by police forces. Posting on a police website the names of those charged with impaired driving will not prevent a single DUI tragedy. It’s a demeaning stunt imported from U.S. populist haters.
News last week of York Regional Police posting on their website the names of everyone charged with impaired driving generated far more thumbs up than down on social media, because DUI tragedies understandably trigger public outrage and sympathy. YRP joins Niagara and Durham in the practice.
This version of internet shaming is new for YRP but ancient in its motivation. It’s just another iteration of the medieval pillory, wherein people are put in tortuous stocks in public squares to face jeering, and pelting with feces and rotten food.
The pillory was a form of corporal punishment that had long been abandoned by Canada and western society. Why? It was a cruel practice. It was also ineffective. After the Enlightenment, our society imagined that prisons could permit a mix of civilized punishment through supervised incapacitation and, in theory, through rehabilitation.
York Regional Police’s actions reflect a frustration with that modern punishment approach. Because it’s not work- ing to achieve the level of behavioural modification that police wish for their communities, notwithstanding that DUIs have been entirely denormalized in but a generation, thanks primarily to the organization Mothers Against Drunk Driving.
It’s one thing for citizens to engage in the internet shaming of others. It’s quite another when it’s done by authorities with great legal powers. If nothing else, it is an affront to the presumption of innocence for a police department to do this. These charges should be thrown out by the courts tomorrow.
People who haven’t had their trial will lose jobs over this chief’s actions, today. Before you say that they deserve to be jobless, remember: they’ve been arrested and charged, the keys have been taken away, while they await their legal fate. Do they also deserve to be immediately sentenced to interminable unemployment — without a trial?
Meanwhile, there is zero evidence that this will provide a deterrent over and above the existing (disproven) deterrents arising from the legal system: licence suspension or prohibition, criminal record, jail. Nor is YRP asking the public for information on these folks. Either police have the forensic evidence or they don’t.
So if it’s not for investigative purposes and it’s not a deterrent, then YRP is insulting the public’s intelligence by engaging in public shaming to no end. This amounts to either a double punishment (if convicted, the mug gets internet shaming without a trial plus the legal punishment of licence suspension plus fine and/or jail time) or wrongful public shaming because they weren’t convicted, amounting to a slander.
Don’t be fooled. This is a PR move parading as a public safety gesture. Online vigilantism by the police may be illegal and unconstitutional. But it’s also, back to my first point, a reflection of a community’s values. Is this what the people of York Region wish for their community? An online pillory?
Before your bloodthirsty “yes!” gets posted, consider where we go with this thinking. Why not permit police to publish names of people they just don’t like? Or why not every crime? Who needs a legal system?
To take out society’s frustration with our legal system, or to take out the undeniable tragedy of impaired driving deaths in such a fashion takes us down the path that led to lynching, witch hunts, and McCarthyism.
Put another way, it’s not very Canadian. Maybe some police leadership actually believe it’s good public policy but in the end it’s just cheap and ugly mob rule, because none of those public interest justifications stand up to scrutiny.
Police boards who tolerate this online pillory are appealing to the worst in all of us, when they are supposed to bring out the better.