AHMEDABAD: When it comes to nabbing
drunk people,
cops usually follow their thumb-rule of smelling the suspect’s
mouth to decide whether he has consumed alcohol. But,
senior police officials claim that the rule is followed only on paper. Given the Covid-19 situation, ‘smelling the mouth’ carries dangerous connotations of breaching
social distancing and putting the suspect in a vulnerable position and promoting spread of disease — as the
coronavirus attacks and resides in the respiratory tract.
Now, police are bringing out a circular which will require reliance on other attributes to justify whether someone was inebriated, rather then mention the fact of ‘smelling the mouth.’
“There are many attributes which one can use to describe a drunk man such as his inability to stand properly, unstable movement, slurred speech, etc, to justify taking the suspect for medical check-up to a hospital to confirm whether he is drunk or not,” said a senior police official.
He confirmed that a circular in this regard will be issued soon.
The sniffing rule has been traditionally used to detect those who break prohibition laws. But senior cops believe it has become a fixed format of the
FIR, when it comes to catching drunk people, and it is mentioned on paper, even if nobody had smelled the mouth of a suspect.
In a recently registered FIR, it was mentioned that during patrolling police came across a man who was not stable on his feet and seemed to be drunk. “The cops called two panch witnesses and then wrote in the FIR, that they themselves first smelt the mouth of the suspect and them made the panch witnesses smell the mouth to ascertain that the suspect is drunk,” said a police official.
“Mostly in all the FIRs registered against an inebriated person, ‘smelling of the mouth’ is mentioned and that phrase will be removed,” said a top
Gujarat police official.
He said before the outbreak of Covid-19 police used to go close to the suspect but now they maintain a certain distance and check his eyes and his ability to speak and stand in proper manner.
“The phrase gives a wrong impression to the public, especially when we are fighting a war against a
pandemic,” said a police official.