As we all heard in the announcements during the week leading up to Sweetheart’s, Edina High School is starting a new program of randomly breathalyzing students as they enter dances. And that’s exactly what happened on Saturday – entirely random breathalyzing.

I dare say, this is wasteful and needless. Students are counted off randomly, and some are breathalyzed when both they and the police officer know that they aren’t drunk. Plus, the officers can’t keep an eye out for actual suspicious activity quite as well as they could if they weren’t busy testing obviously sober students. Beyond that, the groups waiting for their friends to be breathalyzed clog up the entrance.

This is almost reminiscent of the “random” stop-and-frisk policies of New York City, or the random selection for additional screening in airports – there’s an underlying suggestion that actual randomness is the only way to be fair. But this situation is incredibly different from the streets of NYC and the airport. Signs of suspicious activity and terrorism are much more complicated and easily hidden than drunk high school students.

The signs of drugs and alcohol are painfully obvious and hard not to notice. I’m sure this was a successful policy introduction, undoubtedly more successful in reducing student drinking than the policy of not breathalyzing anyone. But I think that, in its current form, it acts as something more of a novelty and a slight insurance policy against early night drinking rather than a well-rounded preventative measure.