Silesian police cannot afford legalization of breathalyzers so use intuition to hunt down drunk drivers.
“We can’t secure safety on the roads without the necessary equipment. We’re not dogs who can sniff if a driver has drank alcohol,” complain traffic policemen from the industrial region of Silesia, southern Poland.
Police in Silesia have 700 devices for estimating blood alcohol content. Most of them are portable breathalyzers used for preliminary testing. If a driver is caught having 0.2 per mill of alcohol in blood they are taken to police station, where they are checked again by a stationary breathalyzer. Only after evidentiary test a driver can be taken to court.
The problem is every half a year breath alcohol devices need to be approved for use and a test of an instrument’s precision is expensive. It costs 200 zloty to check a portable breathalyzer and 200 zloty to check an evidentiary one. Devices which are not legalized cannot be used.
Silesian police cannot afford such tests, which leads to the shortage of breathalyzers.
In Bielsko-Biala all breath testers have been sent for legalization so policemen cannot breathalyze drivers. In Katowice, inhabited by 350,000 people, there is only one alcohol device because the city cannot afford legalization of equipment. “If during a routine control we notice that a driver behaves in a strange way, rocks or smells of alcohol, we take them to police station and breathalyze them there,” say policemen.
Last year policemen detained 15,000 drunk drivers in Silesia. (mg)
Source: Gazeta Wyborcza