A family devastated by a drunk driver gave thanks Thursday to the police officers who did the most enforcement against northern B.C.'s impaired motorists.
"These are the men and women who are fundamentally responsible for making our roads safe," said Laurel Middelaer, mother of four-year-old Alexa Middelaer who was feeding a horse alongside a Ladner road when she was struck dead by a driver who lost control due to drunkenness. "They have delivered on their promise in an exceptional and meaningful way, and we are proud to be recognizing their excellence today in honour of our daughter Alexa."
The officers being recognized were gathered at Immaculate Conception School, alongside provincial road safety officials and Middelaer, who turned her grief into action by forming Alexa's Team, a B.C.-wide annual initiative to reward police members who took action on 12 or more impaired drivers in the past year. Since 2008, the year Alexa was killed, those inducted into Alexa's Team have taken nearly 13,000 impaired drivers off the road.
This year, 45 RCMP members across the north were drafted onto Alexa's Team. The Prince George region had 14 Mounties receive the citation. Reportedly, Prince George's RCMP detachment was the only one in the province in which all members on staff (eight members) surpassed the Alexa threshold.
One of them, Const. Brian Davis, also made the All Star level. To reach that designation an officer needs to take action on at least 34 impaired drivers. Davis wrote up 112.
"Prince George is a target-rich environment," Davis said. "Of the 112 I did, 40 of them came on the same major thoroughfare right through a busy part of the city. A heavy traffic location. Lots of innocent public around."
Particularly disturbing to Davis is the number of people heavily under the influence of a substance early in the morning, and the number of people (sometimes the same ones) who have had multiple convictions for impaired driving.
"They'll tell you as you're writing them a ticket, 'yeah, I have a drinking problem, I'm under a lot of pressure' but with all of the Keys Please and taxi and bus and other alternatives available to you, why would you get behind the wheel?"
Const. Wayne Connell also made Alexa's Team this year and agreed that the impaired drivers often try to talk police officers out of the charges. "Nine out of 10 beg you to not go through with it, but then I tell them about my pregnant wife or my neighbours' kids out on the same road, explain who the victims usually are, and that changes a lot of their attitudes. As a police officer, you take pleasure in getting as many of them as you can because the underlying backdrop is knowing you're saving someone's life. You don't even know whose life it is."
"You'd like to see it go to zero," said Davis. "We'd love to have nobody get on Alexa's Team because the public got itself under control, but the way it's going we're going to have a lot of team members joining in the years ahead. It doesn't have to be that way. What Mrs. Middelaer says about what her family has been through, and what it means to enforce these laws, it's definitely on our minds as we're out there on the road."
