A Fort Collins, Colorado, cop made so many DUI arrests his department designated him their “DUI enforcement officer.”
But there was a problem: Officer Jason Haferman was arresting people who hadn’t been drinking — at least 17 of them over an 18-month period. Read about some of those cases, and the manner of the arrests, here.
The motive appears to have been police funding. It didn’t bother him a bit that he was upending innocent people’s lives. According to one of at least five lawsuits against the officer and city, in Colorado
“The more DUI arrests an agency made each year, … the more grant funding they would receive to do DUI enforcement next year. The additional funding provided by these grants would typically pay for all of the hours worked by the agency’s ‘DUI officer’ … and would also go to fund more equipment and officers for the agency itself, in effect, enabling the department to increase its annual budget on its own.”
(Paragraph 15 on page 3 here.) It might have continued indefinitely if a local TV station hadn’t started looking into the pattern of false arrests. Haferman resigned in December 2022 (see story here).
As far as I can find out, the lawsuits against Fort Collins are still pending; but Loveland, an adjacent city on the same highway, settled a DUI false arrest for $400,000 (see story here).
That plaintiff was subsequently arrested by Haferman and is one of those suing Fort Collins. Another of the Fort Collins arrestees was kept in jail for a year because he couldn’t post bond and I suspect that lawsuit will cost the city a lot more.
This is the high cost of dishonest, greed-driven cops, and departments who hide their misconduct. Because taxpayers pay for it, there’s no incentive on the police to stop such behavior. And it’s more likely to happen in small towns, where dollars for police budgets are harder to come by. It’s called “policing for profit.”