Police officer has personal interest in DWI

Arlington police officer Stacie Brown told a crowd she believed she would see a change in the behavior of drivers after six months with the DWI traffic enforcement unit.

“But I didn’t,” said Brown, 44. “I wasn’t preventing DWIs. I was responding to decisions that had already been made.”

So Brown asked her supervisors at the Arlington Police Department if she could speak to students. It would be a way to get to the drivers of the future before they started drinking and driving, Brown said.

Her supervisors agreed.

“We do this to become more proactive rather than reactive,” said Paul Rodriguez, an Arlington police spokesman.

Some in the audience, made up mostly of law enforcement personnel and victims of drunk drivers, nodded in agreement. They were at the University of Texas at Arlington on Dec. 3 for a Day of Remembrance, a nationwide effort hosted by Mothers Against Drunk Drivers.

It’s an effort that MADD officials said they hope will become an annual event. Chapters in all 50 states had gatherings of survivors who told stories about those they lost to drunk drivers.

Brown said she does dozens of presentations to students each year. She talks about her sister, Shelli Lacy, who was 28 when she got behind the wheel after drinking too much, crashed and died in December 1995.

Brown said she wishes a police officer had stopped her sister and arrested her.

“I tell students that me arresting them is not the worst thing that can happen,” Brown said. “I always say when I arrest someone that maybe I’m saving two lives: the life of the driver and the life of the person that this driver might have hit.”

It was the loss of her sister that prompted Brown to quit her teaching job, become a police officer and join Arlington’s DWI unit in 2007.

“No one ever thinks it’s going to happen to them,” Brown said. “People think, I live right there. I can make it. But if you make that decision at the point where you’ve had two or three drinks, you are not making a good decision.”

This story was originally published December 30, 2015 at 11:24 AM with the headline "Police officer has personal interest in DWI."