[dsfyu404ed]

Between the way the laws are written (tons of discretion given to the officers) and the way the cops operate (they're taught to use word play and field sobriety tests that are specifically designed to let the cop write a police report that makes the suspect look plastered despite reality being otherwise without technically lying[1]) lots of people who are well below the legal limit get charged with DUI. They then spend thousands of dollars on a lawyer getting those charges reduced to "reasonable" stuff (in sarcasm quotes because it's blatant revenue enforcement) that still carries thousands in fines but isn't life ruining.

Don't get me wrong, real DUI is a real crime but for every person charged with that there's another one that thought they were successfully attempting to be lawful by being below the limit who also got charged because that's what the laws permit and that's what the financial incentive is.

[trmsw]

So "tightening the DUI laws" here means giving cops greater latitude to charge people below the legal limit - as opposed to, e.g. increasing the penalties for people who are above it?

Here (well, UK and Belgium) I think the police would not charge you if you passed a test (but they might several times).

One explanation I was given for comparatively poor & worsening road safety in the US was the lack of serious penalties for drunk and dangerous driving.

[dsfyu404ed]

> So "tightening the DUI laws" here means giving cops greater latitude to charge people below the legal limit - as opposed to, e.g. increasing the penalties for people who are above it?

It meant getting eliminating some those crimes the cops don't charge people with but the courts can let people plead down to as lesser offenses and upgrading others to be roughly as life-ruinous as a DUI. This would have caused all those people who caught a DUI charge at .05 because they didn't play their cards right to walk instead of take a plea deal for a lesser charge, much to the detriment of government coffers. I don't think that's necessarily a bad outcome but the point I was making at the time was that financial incentives pervert justice in this case.

(The state in my example was Washington FYI)

>One explanation I was given for comparatively poor & worsening road safety in the US was the lack of serious penalties for drunk and dangerous driving.

And people also complain that the US is a bunch of tee-totaling puritans. Things vary widely by state. I think there's a couple in the midwest that are more lax. Drunk driving has been on a pretty much constant decline since forever so I'm generally suspect of it as an explanation for anything anywhere.