Saturday, October 19, 2013

You Do The Crime, You Do The Time.


 A DUI by definition is a crime punishable by law that is obtained when a driver drives under the influence of any alcoholic beverage or prescription drug and their BAC level exceeds the legal limit of a .08.  I am Hispanic and recently I dealt with getting pulled over and getting charged and arrested with a DUI charge and a bright headlights ticket to top it all off. I’ve always been a very openly person when it comes to things of this nature. I automatically felt better when telling people about this situation, I out of my own will, put myself in.  I always made sure to let people know that I know I messed up, I am honing up to my mistakes now and dealing with the consequences at first and the whole lot of them would just say comforting words to me, which in all reality surprised me.  I expected people to look at me in disgust and they said things like as long as I was all right and I didn’t cause an accident.  In my mind I painted the worse for me but, I was very cooperative with the cops and I found an attorney, to sum it all up I accepted that I did wrong and I would go through my consequences, be them what they must. At this point you must be asking yourself how this ties into race and crime, apart from the very obvious me being Hispanic and the DUI correct?
Fast forward to the end of this night I was so cooperative that I was taken to go withdraw money for my bail and I was even given a ride back home.  When the officer was telling me how my court preceding would go about he told me “ you don’t even have to get represented, you can go in and tell them you’re a student and they’ll understand.”  I was so nice to these cops and cooperated with them on all fronts and then they would go about and feed me this crap.  I told my, now attorney about this and she laughed for a good minute saying that if I wasn’t represented even though I would plead guilty that I would be under risk of receiving the maximum penalties. The maximum penalties are minimum of one year in jail and fines up to $2500 and that’s not including all the classes and other fines I would have to pay.  I asked my attorney why such a nice guy would say something like this and she responded with “these guys aren’t your friends, they are out for their own and they just want to meet their quota.” I didn’t even know until talking to my attorney that I did not have to reveal any information or take any tests. If its one thing I learned from this day is to take cops advice with a grain of salt, no matter how nice they are. I could’ve been another minority in confinement. When thinking about my situation it led me to these two interesting articles about cops trying to meet quotas.  By no means am I saying I am not guilty, I just thought it was interesting. The reason I cooperated was because I didn’t want to get put on the ground, but I now know that you don’t have to do anything or admit to anything.  I handed these cops their case on a silver platter.

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