Drunk and stupid go together like Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd-fun for awhile but eventually somebody ends up with a giant shotgun blast to the face. As human beings, we strive to beat the odds-we try to stare down the inevitable stupid that comes with being blind drunk. It never works. Just ask Kelly Beemer.
Kelly got Olympic class drunk a few days ago and made national news-not because she discovered a cure for cancer and a binge seemed like a great reason to party. She made news because she is a Dallas police officer and the best “drunken haze” idea she could come up with was this- pump a round through the floor of a police car.
Kelly went for a few après-work cocktails to wind down, got drunked-up instead and decided to escape from a colleague’s car. He was smart enough to stop her from driving but she wasn’t smart enough to stay in the car so eventually a few more on duty police officers were called in to give her a ride home.
One of them was Zachary Helm-her boyfriend. The odds are pretty good that he wasn’t expecting Kelly to turn into Annie Oakley during a simple ride home but it happened.
And now it’s national news.
The lesson in this story isn’t moderation-that message is printed on every liquor bottle in North America. Any semi-competent high school guidance teacher can recite that crap like a stuck record.
No, the real lesson is “don’t be a drunk off-duty cop”. Had Kelly been an out of control waitress or Safeway clerk on a tequila binge this would never be a big news story. At most it would make the lineup for a ‘best of’ police camera video on Spike TV. But Kelly is a Dallas police officer-call the tabloids.
The problem is that the human equation is ignored in the story. Zachary, the soon to be ex-boyfriend is getting hung out to dry on this incident. He did the right thing and so did his partner Miguel Jamaica by trying to give Kelly a simple ride home. Maybe they didn’t pat her down and check for that ankle holster but -who could see a Tasmanian Devil act like that coming?
Kelly is probably done as a cop-society is probably safer as a result but the two schmoes who gave her a ride home should go on to bigger and better things as police officers. They did one small thing wrong and everything else right.
Now-thanks to instant media coverage the best they can hope for is to keep their jobs, never move up in rank and not end up as a punch line for a Jay Leno monologue.
That wouldn’t happen if they were truck drivers.
Yes, they should have patted Ms. Beemer down. Murphy's Law says there's a higher chance that the first time you ignore proper safety procedure will be the last.
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