Mesa officer could face criminal charges

If you hadn’t heard about the lat­est Mesa police offi­cer in trou­ble for pos­si­bly dri­ving under the influ­ence, read the arti­cle below. I have no idea if the offi­cer was impaired or not while driving.

I just find it inter­est­ing that the Town of Gilbert Police are say­ing they couldn’t charge him with DUI, based on the time lapse between the acci­dent, and when drink­ing infor­ma­tion was given.

In Arizona it is pretty com­mon to ask crim­i­nal­ists to per­form what’s called a ret­ro­grade (or back­wards extrap­o­la­tion) of someone’s blood alco­hol level. How it works is that given a BAC read­ing at a later time, a prop­erly trained crim­i­nal­ist can per­form cal­cu­la­tions, and approx­i­mate what the person’s BAC would have been at an ear­lier time.

Retrogrades aren’t exact. They aren’t allowed in many states, but in Arizona it’s pretty com­mon. Interestingly enough, plenty of pros­e­cu­tors use this tech­nique to charge some­one with DUI, if the blood draw (or breath read­ing) was taken out­side of the legal 2 hour window.

Now I don’t know any of the specifics sur­round­ing the case, and nor­mally Gilbert police don’t do give any favors to police stopped/suspected of DUI, but I’ve per­son­ally had to do ret­ro­grades for pros­e­cu­tors when a blood draw was out­side the 2 hour window.

But I admit, I never had to do one where a police offi­cer was the subject.

Oh and by the way, Glock doesn’t make .22 cal­iber pis­tols. But they do have Glock model 22s, which are .40 caliber.

Original story posted here.

Criminal charges are being pur­sued against a Mesa police offi­cer for crim­i­nal dam­age and pro­vid­ing false infor­ma­tion to a law enforce­ment offi­cer after he is alleged to have crashed his SUV at Gilbert Town Square last month and left the scene.

Mesa police offi­cer Brent Frasier, who has been with the Mesa Police Department since May 2000, has been on paid admin­is­tra­tive leave since the off-duty inci­dent Dec. 5. Frasier admit­ted to drink­ing alco­hol before the inci­dent, but a Gilbert police spokesman said DUI charges will not be pur­sued against Frasier.

Instead, the Mesa Police Department’s Internal Affairs Unit also has launched an inves­ti­ga­tion into the inci­dent to deter­mine if he vio­lated any depart­ment poli­cies, accord­ing to Sgt. Ed Wessing, a depart­ment spokesman. Wessing said Mesa will wait on the out­come of the Gilbert Police Department’s inves­ti­ga­tion before it deter­mines if and how Frasier will be disciplined.

Although Frasier admit­ted to drink­ing alco­hol before the inci­dent at Gilbert Road and Civic Center Drive, a Gilbert police spokesman said there are legal lim­i­ta­tions that pre­vent DUI charges from being pur­sued because too much time elapsed before Frasier admit­ted to the details sur­round­ing the crash.

Police found Frasier’s badge on the ground near his Chevy Tahoe and a loaded Glock .22-caliber pis­tol on the floor of the vehi­cle, accord­ing to a Gilbert police report.

“We don’t have ade­quate phys­i­cal evi­dence to pur­sue a DUI charge,” said Sgt. Mark Marino, a spokesman for the Gilbert Police Department. “Under state law, to estab­lish some­one was dri­ving under the influ­ence, they must be tested within two hours of dri­ving after the inci­dent to deter­mine whether the blood alco­hol con­tent was .08 or higher.

“There was a time lapse in that he was unac­counted for more than two hours, and because of that, we were unable to estab­lish what his BAC (blood alco­hol con­tent) level was.”