Milwaukee County Sherriff David Clarke has a reputation for cracking down on drunk drivers and pushing for tougher drunk driving laws. The new proposal that would decrease the legal limit from 0.08 to 0.05, however, isn’t exactly what he had in mind.
In Milwaukee, the average drunk driver has a BAC over 0.15; almost twice the legal limit. These individuals, Clarke believes, are the ones law enforcement officers in Wisconsin should be concerned with, not the social drinker who can reach a BAC of 0.05 or higher with one drink.
Sherriff Clarke will instead put his efforts toward criminalizing first time drunk driving offenses in Wisconsin. Wisconsin is currently the only state in which the first drunk driving arrest is not a crime, but an infraction; the punishment no different than a traffic violation.
