AHMEDABAD: The risk of Covid-19 had made the city police scrap their sniffing operating procedure to nab drunks: inhale a nose-full of breath from suspects. Now, ‘red eyes’ will be the blackand-white sign for cops that a person is drunk.
Ahead of anticipated New Year revelry, Ahmedabad Police are having to develop these methods because they don’t have enough breath analyzers.
Sources in the police department said that the latest drunk-detecting criterion may cause the number of prohibition cases to plunge because red eyes are not reliable indicators of being high. Anger, lack of sleep, and medical conditions too can yield false positives.
Nevertheless, a senior officer of Ahmedabad Police said the FIR template for prohibition cases will now contain the line: “Manas ni aankho laal ane nasha ma gherayeli hati”. Roughly translated, it means “the eyes of the person were red and indicated signs of being drunk”.
It is paradoxical that in this era of smart devices, police are resorting to an almost poetic observational tool. The 2020 drunk-eyes diagnosis recalls a line from a 1966 Bollywood song — “madira me doobi akhiyaan” from “Nainon mein badra chhaye” of the film “Mera Saaya”.
“Earlier, cops noted in the FIRs that an accused person’s mouth had been sniffed by police personnel as well as by panch witnesses,” the officer said.
“But in the time of Covid-19 pandemic, it is ill-advised to get up close with the suspect.”
In the new testing regime, people with red eyes will also be made to walk a few steps. If they totter, a complaint under the Prohibition Act will be registered. Later, a medical test will be conducted.
Cops will start scanning people across the city from this week; an eagle eye will be kept on potential red eyes in the period between Christmas and New Year.