You normally would not consider backing into a police car as beneficial to you or society at large. Especially if the police officer whose car it is watches you do it. But it was a fairly good outcome for one man in Morganton, NC.

To understand why, you need to understand the situation. Not long after midnight a while back a member of the Morganton Department of Public Safety (that means she’s a cop) hunted down a gray Honda that had been driving erratically and found it stopped in the middle of the road.

The driver, one Rodney Allen Carter, had the radio on loud. When Officer Kania approached, he began doing weird things: turning the headlights off and on, mumbling, staring at the window buttons. The odor of alcohol was present.

The officer noted that the car wasn’t in park – the driver just had his foot on the brake. When asked to put it in park, he reversed it instead and hit the police car.

Carter tested at .25, more than three times the legal limit for intoxication. That meant he was not in any condition to drive a car.

It Could Have Been Worse

In fact, the driver was a menace who could have easily killed himself or someone else, judging by the fact that he couldn’t even operate a gearshift properly. Backing into the police car was good because it ended the incident with no injury.

What if the officer had been behind the car? What if, instead of backing into the car, he had sped forward and hit someone?

As it was, no one was hurt. The toll of North Carolina alcohol-related road deaths – currently 389 per year or about 28 percent of all road deaths – did not change as a result of anything going on in Morganton.

We all know that the perfect is the enemy of the good. Sometimes the bad is the enemy of the truly disastrous. So we welcome a DWI crash that might have prevented a DWI death. Though a better idea would be no DWIs at all.