This is actually a smart way for an Officer to get trained on how to recognize a drunk driver. This type of training envolves police officers getting drunk inside a controlled environment while the police officers that are sober examine the intoxicated police officers motor skills and speech. Not only that but it will also come in handy when an intoxicated person is brought into court.
http://www.cnn.com/video/?/video/us/2010/02/25/dnt.cops.get.drunk.wdtn
This makes me want to be a police officer! To be honest I don't know if this actually shows the police much more than what is already known. I think most people know when someone is very intoxicated. Everyone knows that drunk people slur their words and loose cordination.
This is actually pretty legit. When I read the title I was thinking that cops were just being fools and drinking because they thought they could. I agree with the previous comment though, I'm sure most people know what an intoxicated person is like. And let's be honest here, it's not like any of the cops themselves have never been intoxicated. Therefore, they should know what to expect regardless. Maybe they were just bored one day and figured "hey, let's try something new here and get wasted but make it look lawful".But, who knows. Maybe they did learn stuff that they didn't previously know, and if they're learning then that's always good. However, everyone reacts to alcohol differently so it's you can't just judge it off of the way you react to it. Another thing I thought of is that some people act drunk/high when they're totally sober. So, you could also run into some issues there!
Haha, I have no idea how they got the people in charge to agree to this. I mean, aren't you trained to know the symptoms of someone under the influence? With that in mind, almost everyone at some time has been under the influence and should know the symptoms or if they haven't experienced it they have seen friends or family first hand. I can see where it would be a fun experiment to do, but not really see how it is educating the police officers.
I agree with all the previous comments here. It's a little ridiculous that they would need to have an officer volunteer to get drunk just to so the rest of the officers can observe their behavior while intoxicated. They should already be able to recognize these signs. This whole experiment, to me, is just another example of how police officers often waste their time dealing with extremely petty things rather than going out and fighting real crime, and getting important things done.
Haha! I can't say that I have ever heard of this being done, however it does make a slight bit of sense. As ridiculous as it may be, these officers could easily be learning new information about intoxicated individuals and their behaviors. In all likelihood, these officers have seen drunken people before and have most likely been drunk themselves at some point, however in most, if not all, of those cases, the officer was off-duty and not exactly sitting back and viewing the intricacies of intoxicated behavior. In this setting, the officers are doing observational research in an attempt to better themselves at their given profession. In the previous settings in which they had seen intoxicated individuals, they were either participating themselves or laughing their asses off. I may be playing Devil's Advocate here, but this could be an effective teaching mechanism.
This came off to be very strange for me at first. I think this kind of thing could be more usefull if they used in maybe in a different way. I feel like you know how a drunk person reacts already, and don't most police officers deal with drunks in their training so I didn't understand why they really had to get drunk and perform the tests themselves. I guess it does show them what to look for and maybe reveals to them the types of actions that drunks do when performing these tasks based off their perfomances. However I truly don't think this seemed to completely benefit the officers much. I understand it helped to understand some of the behaviors, but i feel it would have worked better out in a real world situaiton rather then just in one of the conference rooms at the police station.