The NYPD’s DWI Problem

Over the past five months, an NYPD Sergeant, a Detective and a Police Officer have been charged with driving while intoxicated after striking pedestrians with their vehicles, in two of the cases fatally. Another Detective died in a car crash while allegedly under the influence of alcohol.

But the NYPD’s chief spokesman last week declined to answer a question posed by this newspaper’s Tommy Hallissey about whether this spate of incidents has led Police Commissioner Ray Kelly to consider imposing the same zero tolerance policy for cops who drive while intoxicated as exists for those who use drugs.

The different standard is inexplicable. None of the arguments that are made in defense of allowing cops who drink to excess and then get behind the wheel to keep their jobs holds up under scrutiny.

The most-common one is that alcohol, unlike drugs, is legal. Going hand in hand with that position is that there is a corruption factor that comes into play with drug-abusers that doesn’t exist with boozers.

But while it’s legal to drink, it isn’t to then drive when under the influence. And those who do so are committing at least as serious a crime as those who use cocaine or heroin; in some cases more so, since the NYPD’s one-strike-and-you’re-out drug policy makes no distinction between those who abuse them without leaving their homes but come up dirty on a subsequent test and those who are out in the street presenting a potential menace whether behind the wheel or not.

The corruption concern regarding drug-abusing cops is that they can be blackmailed into either performing or overlooking criminal activities. It may seem there is less of a danger of that occurring when a cop drives while intoxicated. But that notion is dispelled by the NYPD having suspended an officer who allegedly tried to help sober up the cop charged in the September death of the woman he ran down in Brooklyn. If the charge is true, that officer committed a corrupt act. There is also the more-pernicious danger that an already-corrupt cop who helps a colleague to escape a DWI rap could use that to coerce him to look the other way for his own misconduct.

As awful as past cases of cops assisting drug-dealers have been in eroding public confidence in the force, similar damage can be done if citizens believe that cops are able to get away with vehicular homicide while under the influence because of the collusion of fellow officers. That is why we believe it is imperative that the NYPD send a strong signal, to both its employees and the public, that a DWI is a grave-enough offense to cost a cop his job even if no one is injured as a result of that reckless behavior.

Our guess is that Commissioner Kelly has been reluctant to take such strong action until now because while the department and its officers have always viewed drug-users with a certain disdain, drinking has been an accepted part of NYPD culture as a way of bonding and of dealing with stress.

But a similar distinction was once made, even in the upper levels of the department, between taking payoffs to overlook illegal gambling and accepting them for not busting drug-dealers. The Knapp Commission hearings and public outrage at their revelations put an end to the belief that some payoffs were “cleaner” than others.

It goes without saying that having more than one or two drinks is unwise if you carry a gun even when off duty, but it’s also unrealistic to expect that all officers will give up drinking, sometimes to excess. But if they know that getting plastered and then getting behind the wheel could cost them their jobs even if they don’t injure themselves or others, it might be enough of a deterrent for them to put aside any ideas of doing their own driving and have a car service or a friend get them where they need to go. The jobs that are lost by those still foolish enough to put them on the line will be worth the lives that are saved.