Sober Hawaii Man Was Arrested For Drunk Driving To Justify Police Department's Overtime

A Hawaii driver who was falsely arrested for drunk driving in November says a police officer told him to deny further examination at a Pearl City police station. The officer gave Ammon Fepuleai that advice under the pretense of saving him time while being booked for the arrest, which proved to be false and ended with prosecutors dropping the case for lack of evidence, according to Hawaii News Now.

The U.S. is recording alarmingly high cases of false DUI arrests; for the last few years, police departments nationwide have conducted more “emphasis patrols” in order to curb drunk driving. But these DUI checkpoints are often federally-funded, and the overtime hours they provide are paid for by state and federal agencies, rather than the police departments carrying out the patrols.

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HNN investigated the case, compiling information from Fepuleai’s arrest documents as well as video and audio footage from the officer’s body cam, which the patrolman turned off at one point — a violation of the Honolulu Police Department’s arrest procedures.

What is most striking about the incident is how rote the DUI stop goes, and how blithely police dismissed evidence they collected, which suggested Fepuleai was, indeed, not drunk. It’s almost as if the police knew he was telling the truth, but arrested and processed him anyway just to raise their arrest stats. Per HNN: