Cops: "Your Classmates Are Dead. Just Kidding."

A police officer goes to a high school and gravely tells students that one of their classmates just got killed in a drunk-driving accident. Fifteen minutes later, he makes the same announcement, about a different student. Fifteen minutes after that, he reports that a third student has just perished in yet another roadside tragedy. By the end of the day, 26 students and five staff members have been added to the death count, and a memorial service is held in their honor.

Proponents of this police mendacity educational program say that it teaches kids about the dangers of alcohol, claiming that beer or booze are involved in a deadly U.S. car crash every fifteen minutes.

Personally, I find the way this lesson is delivered appallingly morbid and lachrymose. It's also an invitation to practice the one-upmanship of ersatz grief, a masochistic lust that Christopher Hitchens addressed brilliantly in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings.

As for the effectiveness of drunk-driving scare tactics, we'll see; I will say that anti-drug crusaders visiting schools have an embarrassing success record.

I'd love it if we left the business of educating kids to parents and teachers, and if cops went back to what they're being paid to do: patrolling our streets and highways, and maybe apprehending, oh I dunno, actual drunk drivers.

Comments

[Myrtle]

Sounds like the emotional equivalent of "shock therapy."

Except that none of the patients (students) have been diagnosed with a mental illness that requires this sort, or any sort, of therapy.

Well, that's the way of the nanny state, treat everyone as mentally defective and give them the treatment whether they need it or not.

[ben]

Are these kids supposed to believe anything police officers tell them, after this experience?

[markm]

Ben: So it *does* teach a valuable lesson. ;-)

As someone who has gone through DARE in elementary school, middle school, and high school, I can assure you that it does not fulfill its purpose - to educate about drugs. The program is not education, it is scare tactics. Essentially, you learn that once you start any drug, you will eventually become addicted to all drugs, and that all people who use alcohol, tobacco, or illegal drugs are bad people.

I remember coming home from school CRYING because my parents drank a glass of wine with dinner or a few beers every so often. I was absolutely sure they would not be able to stop.

The most interesting part of DARE is that once you find out that smoking one cigarette does not make you an addict, you question the danger of any drug, and wonder if heroin and cocaine are really so bad.

[Jeff the Poustman]

If all the (allegedly) drug-related deaths of the day come from constituents of that one school, then all we'd have to do is close that school down and we'd have solved the problem.

[K. Dale Boley]

I'd go one step farther Rogier. I don't like cops patrolling our streets and highways. I say cops should stay in their police stations until called by a citizen wronged. If there is no who has been wronged, there is no crime. They should enforce human laws of property, person, and contract. That's pretty much it. If someone causes harm to another person, through negligence or willfully, we hold them accountable and punish them severely.