Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, May 7, 1990 TAG: 9005070257
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A5 EDITION: EVENING
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Medium
"I had a few beers, I guess," the man said as he stood weaving slightly in a parking lot. He good-naturedly tried to follow instructions to count his fingers and stand with his arms outstretched and his eyes closed.
But his mood suddenly turned hostile when Officer Dale B. Curtis said he was under arrest for drunken driving.
"Are you crazy?" the man yelled. "What are you locking me up for?"
The suspect already has two convictions for drunken driving and faces mandatory jail time if he is convicted again.
Curtis feels certain he will get that third conviction. The arrest last month was captured on a video camera he keeps in his patrol car.
"A picture's worth a thousand words," Curtis said as he showed the videotape on a television in his precinct office.
Richmond is among a dozen cities nationwide that have received the video cameras under a program sponsored by Aetna Life & Casualty and Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Since the program began in July, the cities have received 253 dashboard-mounted cameras bought by Aetna for $965 each, said Robert D. Caruthers, spokesman for Aetna in Hartford, Conn.
He said the company plans to send cameras to seven more cities this month and hopes to be in about 30 cities before winding up the project at the end of the year. MADD is helping Aetna distribute the cameras.
"We hope that this can become a model for private sector-public sector cooperation on a major societal problem," Caruthers said.
That problem cost the insurance industry about $10 billion in 1987 in payments for car repairs, medical treatment and liability claims from drunken-driving accidents, Caruthers said.
"If you could reduce the costs of these alcohol-related crashes by just 10 percent, you could save $1 billion," he said. "It is a major financial problem in addition to taking a terrible human toll."
Caruthers said the video cameras have saved police money, too, because most of the suspects who are captured on videotape plead guilty. Police in Columbus, Ohio, estimated that the cameras have saved them $4,000 in officers' overtime for court appearances since November.
Richmond police have videotaped 10 drunken-driving arrests since they got 10 cameras in November, said police Sgt. Burton T. Walker, who coordinates the program. Nine defendants pleaded guilty before the tapes could be shown in court and the 10th was found guilty without the evidence. He dropped his appeal when he learned the tape would be shown, Walker said.
"It's the best evidence if there is any dispute as to whether the person was intoxicated or not," he said.
Before the videotapes, he said, judges had to decide between conflicting testimony of police officers and defendants who show up in court clean and sober.
"They come to court looking like little angels," Walker said.
The idea began with two Houston police officers who bought their own cameras because they were frustrated with judges' easy treatment of drunken drivers. Walker said lenient judges have not been a problem in Richmond.
The camera has been used in far more than 10 arrests, Walker said, but the videotape sometimes was useless because the lighting was bad, the remote microphone did not work or the batteries died.
"We've pretty much worked out all of the bugs," he said.
Michael Morchower, a defense attorney who handles drunken-driving cases, said there are no constitutional problems with videotaping a drunken driver without his knowledge.
"It's a great idea," he said. "It certainly has a sobering effect on how an attorney might handle a case."
by CNB