Getting Volunteers Drunk at Field Sobriety Training

VIDEO – HAPPY GUINEA PIGS –

June 16, 2023 – Sgt. David Bentz said this type of training gives officers a big advantage over regular police academy training. “We take the officers, give them 24 hours of training, one day of lecture and theory, and basically 2 days of how to perform standardized field sobriety testing so that we can make good DUI arrests on the street and get impaired drivers off the road.” Bentz says the next step of the training is ARIDE, advanced roadside impairment detection training, which is more drug related, but begins with the building blocks of good a solid standardized field sobriety test. “So for the volunteers, it’s basically a 5 hour day. We start them drinking a little bit early so that we can get them up to a level where they’re eyes do what we need eyes to do when you’re impaired. For the officers, it’s about learning what those eyes do when you are impaired” said Bentz. “And the biggest part of today is the mechanics of that testing because it’s standardized. So they have to issue the test in the same way to every person that they issue them to. So that’s why they repetitively do tests over and over and over.”