- A person tried stopping a driver they believed was drunk on New Year’s Eve.
- Police arrived and discovered the allegedly drunk driver was actually completely sober.
- The driver who stopped them turned out to be the intoxicated one instead.
Some people live by the adage “when you see something say something.” Others go even further than simply speaking up though. They take action to stop whatever it is that they see going wrong. In this story, the person who stepped up to help the community ended up being the one in the wrong to begin with.
That’s what Canada’s Royal Mounted Police say about an incident that occurred on December 31, 2024. Evidently, a driver called in a tip about another driver who they suspected was under the influence. In an attempt to end the potential threat to the public, the same caller found a way to pull over the suspected drunk driver. That’s when things got funny weird.
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According to the RCMP, they arrived on the scene and made contact with both drivers. The one suspected of being under the influence was actually sober. Their potentially erroneous behavior was allegedly just a product of their struggles with driving at night. What surprised the police, though, was that the person who called in the tip and stopped the other driver was, in fact, inebriated themselves.
“When officers arrived, they smelled alcohol on the breath of the second driver and administered a roadside alcohol screening test, which the driver failed. The driver received an immediate 90-day driving prohibition and had their vehicle impounded for 30 days,” reads a report from the RCMP.
“Unfortunately, there are many people who still believe it is okay to drink and drive, ” says Sergeant Shane Worth of the Oceanside RCMP. “Impaired driving is an offense, it is dangerous to everyone using the roads and our officers are targeting impaired drivers every day of the year to take them off the street.”
Worth says that in part because they took other impaired drivers off the road that night too. One failed an alcohol screening test and the other refused to take the test in the first place. Either way, driving under the influence is obviously very dangerous for yourself and others. Sometimes, such as the aforementioned incident, can lead to harmless, but still dumb, behavior that can get you into trouble.