We have discussed before that the field sobriety tests done by a police officer when he or she arrests somebody for a Lubbock DWI are basically designed for somebody to fail.
Here is what we do know:
- none of the field sobriety tests were designed to determine if somebody can safely operate a motor vehicle
- none of the field sobriety tests can test whether somebody is “intoxicated” because they have lost the normal use of their mental or physical faculties
- the initial “validation” studies for the field sobriety tests were done in a lab not out on the street and the success rate at determining whether a person’s blood alcohol concentration was over a .10 (legal limit at the time) was in the 60 and 70% mark
- the three field “validation” studies did not contain any independent evaluators to watch the police officers and provide independent analysis
- the field tests, whatever minimal validation there exists, cannot compensation or be adjusted for errors in the testing by the police officer
- the latest study actually changed the scoring procedure on one test to allow the officer to count as intoxicated individuals who’s blood alcohol was .03 to .06 which is below the legal limit and not intoxicated under state law
- The same study shows if the officer does the test wrong his percentage of intoxicated arrests goes up because subjects who are not intoxicated still show the clues he is counting as intoxicated
- Most importantly we know that the scientific community overwhelmingly believes these balance dexterity tests have no validity and no place in science
Now we also know that
No, you really can’t focus on the road while you’re yakking away on your cell phone — and a new study explains why.
This new research builds on the well-known “Gorillas in Our Midst” experiment, a staple of Psych 101 courses. Researchers say they can now explain why many people fail to see a “gorilla” who unexpectedly appears in a video when their attention is focused on another task — it’s because they have lower “working memory capacity,” a measure of the ability to keep your brain tuned into many things at once.
In the study, 197 psychology students (ages 18 to 35) watched a 24-second video of six people playing basketball. They were asked to count the number of bounce passes and aerial passes made by the black-shirted team. Twelve seconds into the video, an actor dressed in a gorilla suit walks into the hoops game, pounds his chest, then leaves. The “gorilla” appears on screen for eight seconds.
After viewing the segment, researchers asked participants for the two different pass counts and whether they noticed anything unusual in the clip. Slightly more than half the participants, or 58 percent, noticed the ape but 42 percent did not.
Amazing isn’t it that driving isn’t a divided attention task after all and yet everyday officers who make an arrest for a Lubbock DWI always testify that these balance and dexterity tests mimic what we do daily in a car.
As the old saying goes, “garbage in, garbage out.”
