What not to say — or do — when a cop asks if you’ve been drinking

The other night when a black Chevy Impala slammed into a guardrail along Briarcliff Road in east Macon, a Bibb County sheriff’s deputy pulled up and found the driver “severely upset.” In his write-up of the encounter, the deputy went on to note that he asked the driver if he was OK. The driver, 27, said his car had “shut off by itself and caused the accident.” The deputy, though, sensed another possible cause. “I could,” the deputy wrote in his report, “smell an odor of an alcoholic beverage coming from his person.” It was the wee hours of Oct. 22, going on 3 a.m. The deputy asked the guy where he had been. The man said he’d been downtown at a bar. When asked if he’d had anything to drink, the man said, “Duhhhh.” After taking some sobriety tests, including a breath test that registered more than twice the legal limit, the man refused further examination. To emphasize his displeasure in the moments before his arrest, the man, according to the deputy’s report, “turned his back towards me and gave me the middle finger.” Asked if he would submit to an official blood-alcohol test at the sheriff’s office, the deputy noted, “he again faced his back towards me and gave me the middle finger for his answer.” He was charged with DUI. Later at the county lockup, the man went on disregarding the authorities. At the jail’s booking desk, as his pockets and clothes were being searched, the man “decided to dance with his butt towards the booking deputy behind him.”

This story was originally published November 1, 2017 at 12:00 AM with the headline "What not to say — or do — when a cop asks if you’ve been drinking."