Sometimes it’s better to stay in on a weekend and play video games. Here’s why.

On a night in October, a sobriety checkpoint was placed at the main entrance to the University. All incoming traffic was asked to stop and be submitted to the necessary inquiries by a friendly University police officer. According to Binghamton’s New York State University Police (as per their Web site), the purpose of this checkpoint was simply “to educate the driving public as to the dangers of impaired driving, as well as to enhance our enforcement efforts in this critical area.”

Now, this seems to be an admirably innocent and beneficial goal. Nobody should be driving drunk, so a sobriety checkpoint is a good thing.

However, when my friend returned from a trip to the movie theater (the movies, for chrissakes), the taxi he was traveling in with a group of his friends was stopped at the sobriety checkpoint. The officer would not have been able to smell any alcohol, because no one had been drinking. The officer would have no reason to ask for drivers’ licenses (as per NYS law*), because none of the students were driving. Yet the officer immediately demanded the licenses of everyone riding in the taxi. After receiving the licenses, he carefully scrutinized each one, and then issued my friend a misdemeanor charge and suspended his license for having altered it.

It was only a few hours later when he thought, “Was what the officer did even legal?”

According to the New York Civil Liberties Union, the answer is a resounding NO. Yet the aforementioned friend was not only subjected to that experience, but he has also had to hire an attorney (ridiculously expensive), go to court (ridiculous, period) and is now fighting a class A misdemeanor. WHICH WAS ISSUED UNLAWFULLY.

It’s after having written all this that I’d like to send a polite but firm message to the NYSU officers: stop overstepping your bounds.

I’ll use myself as an example: I don’t drink, and I don’t smoke pot. However, between this column and another recently-published column about police officers prowling the Nature Preserve at all hours of the evening, I’m worried that soon an officer will be pulling ME over and arresting me for not obeying local bicycling ordinance #15543.a, which CLEARLY states I must salute him when he passes.

I understand full well some might disagree with me. One might say that I’m not appreciating the police for what they do and the risks they take. In anticipation of this, I’d like to make clear that I do. I respect the officers that take their job seriously, and would apologize if they accidentally breached a student’s rights trying to do their job and keep us safe … but I doubt the officer(s) who manned the sobriety checkpoint had that in mind when they pulled over the taxi my friend was in.

*NYS law requires drivers to show their license, registration and insurance card upon request. (This and all other information except that from the NYCLU taken from NYSU police Web site.)

— Peter Groh is a freshman. He might sound like a future lawyer, but he’s actually a total wuss who likes poetry and Wegman’s Oreos.