The story of Elizabeth Daly’s arrest sounds like an urban legend, except it actually happened.
Last April, a half-dozen plainclothes ABC agents swarmed the third-year College student’s car in the Barracks Road shopping center. They mistook the sparkling water she had bought for beer. Daly and her sorority sisters, unsure that the agents were legitimate, refused to open the car doors. One of the agents pulled a gun, and another tried to smash Daly’s car window with a flashlight. Daly panicked and drove off, grazing two agents in the process.
The incident seems farcical: the slapstick of the agents spinning off the car’s windshield as Daly sped away; the ludicrousness of the ABC thinking it needed six armed agents to handle some sorority girls buying LaCroix and cookie dough.
The ABC’s superhero complex, however, is less comedic when we show you Daly’s tear-stained mug shot. The 20-year–old spent a night in jail, charged with felony counts of assaulting law enforcement officers and eluding police.
Making jokes about LaCroix and the ABC’s incompetence is a natural response to a baffling incident like the Barracks Road encounter. But we must remember that Daly’s arrest was, first and foremost, a problem of justice — a clear example of a law enforcement agency overstepping its bounds.
The Virginia ABC has made several policy changes in response to the public outcry that followed the sparkling-water debacle. We are still waiting, however, on the ABC to release a review of the Daly incident completed by the state police. The agency should release the state police’s report promptly.
A two-page directive to all ABC law enforcement personnel, which The Daily Progress obtained last Thursday, requires that agents who point a weapon at someone or damage property complete a report documenting their actions. The document also instructs agents to wear an overgarment marked “ABC Special Agent” when conducting traffic stops or assisting police with violent incidents.
We are not wholly convinced that ABC agents should carry weapons at all, unless they are responding to an incident alongside local or state police. But the policy changes are still a step in the right direction. In fact, they are overdue. Wearing identifying clothing does not seem like too much of a burden for law enforcement agents. Two of the agents in the Daly incident were wearing T-shirts.
The ABC, however, has yet to release the report state police compiled on the Daly incident. It should do so promptly. The public still does not quite understand how or why ABC agents thought that what they did in the Barracks Road shopping center was acceptable behavior.
An audio recording of a 911 call by one of the girls in Daly’s car gives us a hint of the blind self-assurance that the ABC agents demonstrated that day. The first minute or so of the two-minute call is punctuated by screams as the girls panic inside the car. After Daly pulls over, the caller hands the phone to an ABC agent on the 911 dispatcher’s request.
The agent’s account of the incident is: “everybody’s showing badges and everything, and as soon as we got in front of them they pulled off and tried to run over people.” Saying that Daly “tried” to run someone over — imputing that intention to her — might not have been what the agent meant to convey. Nonetheless, his take on the encounter tells us something of the distorted viewpoint through which the ABC seems to regard its mission.
The Daly incident remains perplexing — and it’s too serious to laugh off. We hope the state police’s review of the case was thorough enough to uncover what went so wrong in the ABC. The public deserves to know more about the attitudes that drove ABC agents to arrest a 20-year-old girl who had never consumed alcohol. Deficient policies are always worth addressing. But it’s the palpability of the ABC’s power-blind self-justification that was most troubling about Daly’s arrest.
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