Damn Those Drunk Captains

And those lieutenants, always showing up for work three sheets to the wind:

• Mayor Richard Daley has asked aldermen to approve five-year contracts with Chicago police captains and lieutenants that include new language on alcohol testing.

  The agreements do not cover wage increases, but they do call for random alcohol testing and say that captains or lieutenants who discharge their weapons will be subject to mandatory drug and alcohol testing, according to a statement from the mayor's office. The testing will be done after all shootings, including on- and off-duty.

Why is this a story? Has there been a sudden outbreak of white shirts discharging weapons drunk? This would appear to be a very minor concession on the parts of the Captain and Lieutenant unions. In fact, the head of the Captains union said as much:

• Virginia Drozd, president of the captains association, said the terms demanded by the city are “standing operating procedure” in other big-city departments.

  “If you were an engineer on a train or a pilot on a plane that crashed, you’d have to submit to drug and alcohol testing. I’m not saying I like it. But, it wasn't so unreasonable that we thought it was a dealbreaker,” she said.

But the hook in the headline makes it appear that this is some endemic problem. You have to dig through twelve paragraphs to find this tidbit:

• Chicago Police officers are arrested for DUI at a far lower rate than drivers as a whole. Thirteen officers were charged with DUI in 2008 — about one in 1,000 officers — compared to about one in 125 in the general population.

But trust the media to take two supervisor contracts and boil them down to a paragraph or two that deal with an issue that will come up once in a blue moon.