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Sober Hawaii Man Was Arrested For Drunk Driving To Justify Police Department’s Overtime

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In the land of the free, you can­not make this shit up. How intrin­si­cal­ly cor­rupt the police depart­ments are. No, these things are not hap­pen­ing in Russia, China, Or Iran; they are hap­pen­ing in America.

A Hawaii dri­ver who was false­ly arrest­ed for drunk dri­ving in November says a police offi­cer told him to deny fur­ther exam­i­na­tion at a Pearl City police sta­tion. According to Hawaii News Now, the offi­cer gave Ammon Fepuleai that advice under the pre­tense of sav­ing him time while being booked for the arrest, which proved to be false and end­ed with pros­e­cu­tors drop­ping the case for lack of evidence.

The U.S. is record­ing alarm­ing­ly high cas­es of false DUI arrests; for the last few years, police depart­ments nation­wide have con­duct­ed more “empha­sis patrols” to curb drunk dri­ving. But these DUI check­points are often fed­er­al­ly-fund­ed, and the over­time hours they pro­vide are paid for by state and fed­er­al agen­cies rather than the police depart­ments car­ry­ing out the patrols

HNN inves­ti­gat­ed the case, com­pil­ing infor­ma­tion from Fepuleai’s arrest doc­u­ments as well as video and audio footage from the officer’s body cam, which the patrol­man turned off at one point — a vio­la­tion of the Honolulu Police Department’s arrest procedures.

What is most strik­ing about the inci­dent is how rote the DUI stop goes, and how blithe­ly police dis­missed evi­dence they col­lect­ed, which sug­gest­ed Fepuleai was, indeed, not drunk. It’s almost as if the police knew he was telling the truth, but arrest­ed and processed him any­way just to raise their arrest stats. Per HNN

Right after Fepuleai was cuffed and put in the patrol car, the trans­port­ing offi­cer appears to turn off the body cam­era, even though pol­i­cy requires it stay on dur­ing the ride.

Fepuleai said that’s impor­tant because on the way to the Pearl City sub­sta­tion, he said the offi­cer told him to refuse fur­ther tests in an effort to save time.

Fepuleai said he lis­tened and post­ed $500 bail.

He now regrets lis­ten­ing to the offi­cer. “He shouldn’t have giv­en me that advice and I hope that they’re not giv­ing oth­er inno­cent peo­ple the same advice,” Fepuleai said.

[…]

Jonathan Burge, an attor­ney who spe­cial­izes in traf­fic cas­es, said he has heard from mul­ti­ple oth­er clients that offi­cers are giv­ing that advice.

Burge said some offi­cers want to get back out to make more arrests.

“When you do the road­blocks, you’re expect­ed to get a DUI arrest because they’re pay­ing over­time,” Burge said, adding “there is pres­sure for stats.”

DUI check­points are often federally-funded.

And sim­i­lar police behav­ior has been record­ed in oth­er places, such as Fort Collins, Colorado. An inves­ti­ga­tion car­ried out by the Coloradoan found that an offi­cer tasked with catch­ing drunk dri­vers near­ly dou­bled his arrests year-over-year from 50 DUI arrests in 202o, to 90 in 2021, then 190 in 2022.

After a series of law­suits for wrong­ful arrests, the offi­cer resigned before the depart­ment could fire him for improp­er con­duct — which is encour­aged both implic­it­ly and explic­it­ly by the fund­ing tied to these DUI patrols.