Citizen's Academy-DRE/Traffic Safety

This past week has been very interesting as well as exciting on the academy. On Thursday the topic was traffic safety and talking with a DRE. Do you know the top 3 traffic fatalities? The number one death is no seat belt. The second one is speed and the third is OWI'S. I would of never guess that. Then we had Sgt. Belz talk to us about his job as a DRE. Do you know what that stands for?
Drug Recognition Expert. He is like an investigator. He gathers all information when someone is picked up for OWI and then he is the one to question them to see if they are on other drugs besides alcohol. It was very informative. I had to do one of the Field Sobriety Tests in front of the class. Oh, boy! I ended up doing the Walk and Turn test for when someone is stopped for alcohol. I have never been picked up for drinking so I had to walk the 9 steps with one foot touching the other foot on a straight line and count my steps out loud and turn around and go back again counting out loud. Do you think I passed this test? I didn't and I never had a drink. Before I did this I explained to him my situation of my health and they do take that into consideration. So if you have a handicap of some kind then the DRE can figure that into the situation and that is why the breathe test is given to see if alcohol is present. This DRE has been doing his job for quite sometime He has done 140 drug evaluations and out of that he is 95% accurate. That means he knows what drugs a person could be on before the urine sample. The urine sample is the last step in doing a drug evaluation.The DRE told us he has a story for every question someone would ask. Man, was I surprised at the stories he had.
This week's food was, pasta casserole, green beans, bun, banana, oranges or apples to pick from and cupcakes.