Statham Georgia Police improper arrests.
What does an officer, sworn to uphold the law, do, when he has not received training to determine if a person is intoxicated?
Arrest them anyway!
Pretty scary to know that you could be completely innocent and still be arrested, spend time in jail, lose your driver’s license and potentially be branded as a criminal for life, not to mention having your insurance premiums shoot through the roof . . . all because an officer was under pressure to make arrests and had no clue about what he was doing.
This is why DUI is so subjective — it depends on an officer’s training and discernment to make the right call. Without that training, an officer is just “winging it” and there is way too much at stake for a sworn police officer to just make it up as he is going along.
Get Kelly Case’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
But that is exactly what Officer Marc Lofton of the Staham Police did. And people were convicted and lost their licenses and suffered all of the other collateral consequences of a false arrest and conviction.
And the solution is that the Chief thinks he should be sent for “additional training”, after he was caught being dishonest! To make matters worse, Officer Lofton, according to CBS News, failed the training the first time and continued to make arrests based on training that he could not pass.
I high disagree that he needs to have additional training, and I am sure that his superiors will agree when they are subpoenaed to testify about his failures and mistatements.
Read the full story here: http://www.cbs46.com/story/34186129/police-chief-acknowledges-officer-needs-dui-training
My mom always said, “When a person shows you who they are . . . believe them!”
This is why I always advise people to NEVER perform any tests or answer any questions form law enforcement when you have been pulled over. Of course everyone thinks, “It could never happen to me,” until it does, just like the people falsely accused by Officer Marc Lofton.
