The Sting of 2 Operations Was Felt Chiefly by the Taxpayers

News reports about two May 9 police-sponsored operations provide a perfect opportunity to question America’s future.

Simi Valley police conducted a sting operation involving 73 businesses that sell alcohol, resulting in the citing of one clerk. The smaller issue was the headline that blared, “Sting Nets 1. . . “ instead of something like, “Simi Valley Clerks Are Doing a Great Job of Not Selling Alcohol to Minors.”

The larger issue involves the store owners. California law requires these owners to have employees read and sign a 12-page form by which the employees attest that they are aware of the laws regarding alcohol sales to minors (and tobacco sales to children) and the ramifications of making the sales. A clerk who gets caught can be fined $600 and must be fired. The store owners also face up to $5,000 in fines and possible revocation of their licenses--even if they were not present when an illegal sale occurred.

Obviously, store owners who themselves sell alcohol to minors should be punished. But other owners can only do so much, and must hope that their clerks don’t screw up when they are not around. Because there is no mechanism to keep a fired clerk from finding employment at another store, the law is unjust, leaving owners the only ones who really suffer.

Evidenced by the disparity of the fines, the owners are the state’s catch of the day. And although the results of these stings can destroy the lives of a small percentage of business owners, the sobriety checkpoints addressed in the second article--”Officers Arrest 5 at Sobriety Checkpoint”--affect everyone.

A Port Hueneme / Oxnard cooperative effort in which 1,135 vehicles passed through the checkpoint resulted in five arrests and a dozen license or vehicle code citations.

Because reports never offer the number of citations or arrests made by officers on normal patrol during that same time period, people can only wonder whether they would be better served by having the officers staffing these checkpoints on patrol duty instead.

Law-abiding citizens (like the 98.6% of those trapped by the latest checkpoint) simply trying to get from one place to another should start questioning whether their Constitution’s 4th Amendment is still in effect. They need to ask their legislators to pose that same question to the courts.

Although these two police operations may seem very different, they have something in common: Taxpayers are footing the bill for the overtime pay the officers are getting. And no matter how much you might like to, only a fool would blame the police.

Ten bucks here, a couple of hundred bucks there. It’s a sad state of affairs but the people we pay to protect us are rapidly getting demoted to little more than revenue generators for the state. And they, through stings and checkpoints, are increasingly being asked to undermine out most basic freedoms, and by groups that simply don’t get it.

In the real world, no matter how hard we try to stop them, kids are going to get alcohol and somebody is going to get behind the wheel after drinking. We have laws that deal with these realities.

Considering that life in a non-communist society is a gamble, there have got to be better ways to invest the money spent on these operations (not to mention more heinous crimes for our police to fight) and far better ways to treat the consummate gamblers: small-business owners.