Police PRO assures officers will not pull over drivers willy-nilly

The Barbados Police Service will be utilising breathalyser testing from April 1, more than two years after the supporting legislation came into effect.

Speaking on Thursday on a popular call-in programme on 98.1 FM, Police Public Relations Officer Acting Inspector Rodney Inniss said officers have completed extensive training to use the devices.

The law which allows the test to be administered came into effect on January 1, 2020, but implementation was stalled pending officer training and a public awareness campaign.

“We had to do a lot of training, we had to get the equipment in and do internal training among the police officers, and decided formally that this breathalyser will be launched on April 1,” Inniss said.

“We are educating people so that they will know. We don’t want to be prosecuting persons, we want to educate them so that we can have safer roads.”

The police PRO explained that even though individuals have different tolerance levels for alcohol, the device is set to measure alcohol content on the breath.

“So it doesn’t matter if you had a flask of rum or three beers. What matters is the results when we test you and the results tell us whether you are legally drunk or not,” he said.

Under the amendments to the Road Traffic Act which provide for breathalyser testing, the legal alcohol limit was set at 35 microgrammes of alcohol per 100 millilitres of breath.

During the radio programme, members of the public raised questions about how breathalyser testing will be applied.

Inniss assured the procedure will be carried out fairly and without bias to any race or socioeconomic class.

“We don’t target those people. We target bad drivers and drunk drivers. What the law provides is that police officers are not allowed to just willy-nilly pull over a person and test them,” he said.

Identifying some of the circumstances in which a person would be pulled over, the police spokesperson added: “If you are driving and you are speeding, or you are erratic in your driving, or you have gone through a traffic light, or something like that.”

“If we suspect that you have excess alcohol in your system then we can test you, but the police officers are advised not to just go to Joe Public and pick out a person and say ‘I want to test you’; there must be some reason to test you.

The move to finally introduce breathalyser testing will no doubt have the support of the Barbados Road Safety Association whose president Sharmane Roland-Bowen has long championed for the measure to be introduced.

Failing a breathalyser test can result in penalties ranging from fines to jail time.

First-time offenders can face a fine of $5,000 or imprisonment for two years, or both on summary conviction, and disqualification from holding or obtaining a second or subsequent convictions can result in a $10,000 fine or five years in prison, or both, and an offender would be disqualified from holding or obtaining a licence for five years after conviction. Any subsequent convictions would result in a permanent ban on having a driver’s licence. kobiebroomes@barbadostoday.bb