A Kansas sheriff offers drunk teens a ride home. Hey teenagers: do you have a cool adult who you trust to drive you home after you get drunk?
If not, the Wabaunsee County Sheriff’s Office wants to be that person. That’s the message from a post that the sheriff shared Wednesday to Instagram and Facebook.
Using a few hundred words (and a handful of emojis), Sheriff Eric Kirsch invited teens to call law enforcement if they need a sober driver: “SO….in WABAUNSEE COUNTY KANSAS if you’re drunk as hell & under 21 & need to get home safe, you can call us & we’ll get you home safe.”
For the “young adults” who accepted the offer, he promised not to cite them with a minor in possession of alcohol.
The post is a masterpiece of social media, attracting more than 1 million views in the first few hours. Kirsch hopes teens think, “Wait a minute guys, let’s call the Sheriff’s Office” after a night of Jägerbombs and Bongzillas. In the process, the message charmingly zigzags all over the place.
Kirsch morbidly opens with the military and law enforcement resumes of the department’s officers, complete with all caps at all the wrong moments, by listing “HORRIFIC crimes like homicides,” “a serial killer” and “decades in and out of combat zones.” One jarring sentence lists, “child molestation & online child crimes investigations, busted up PEDOPHILE NETWORKS & other sinister human trafficking syndicates.”
The perfect words to convince a tipsy teenager to stagger into a police cruiser? Nope.
After that wobbly start, Kirsch gets down to business by offering teenagers a ride home “if you’re drunk as hell.” I think most college-town Uber drivers would tell you the clean-up risk of wasted first-time drinkers. Teenagers often volunteer the alcohol they just drank right back to the world. Puke clean up is a startling new job responsibility that the sheriff is possibly assigning his deputies. Here’s hoping Wabaunsee County has invested in rubber floor mats.
This is a good moment to inspect the photo that accompanied the words. The top of the image has the badge of the department against the black Kansas sky. At the center, a law enforcement officer smiles — a flashlight, handgun and body camera strapped to his vest. His thumbs-up gesture is mimicked, with varying levels of enthusiasm, by a few of the teens who flank him. Their faces appear to be lit by the strobing lights of a sheriff’s cruiser.
The teenagers are perfectly Midwest. Their hoodies advertise Coors beer and the Bank of the Flint Hills, brands that likely don’t appreciate these product placements alongside teen drinking, thank you very much. The boys mostly wear baseball caps, while one girl stands uneasily near the middle, nervously hinging her OnCloud sneaker in the gravel.
At the center of the photo is the contraband: plastic bags from WalMart and Dollar General, filled with empty cans of Mike’s Hard Lemonade and other alcohol. The sheriff reveals that they had also been drinking beers and Boone’s Farm Wine, the archetypal teen garbage swill. He writes: “HORRIBLE BOONES FARM WINE (that’s basically engine degreaser dudes, you should be ashamed of yourselves )”. It’s a standard and cringey aside that signals: “You can trust me! I’ve been a young drinker before.”
(Only slightly more likely to appeal to 2025 teens? The sheriff’s office replied to its own post with a song from 2007, when many of them had yet to be born.)
If these words aren’t convincing teens, Kirsch next tries compassion, and it’s a heavy, heartfelt dose: “I’m tired of carrying people off the roadway in the aftermath of entirely avoidable tragedy.” There’s a bit of patriotism swirled in as Kirsch calls teens “the future leaders of this Great Nation & we NEED AND WANT you ALL to succeed.”
For anyone who has coached, taught or mentored young people, this post presents a familiar conundrum: In order to keep teenagers safe, we need them to trust us adults.
Does that trust come through showing them expertise by listing law enforcement accomplishments?
Does that trust come through showing them compassion by reminding them, as Kirsch write, that, “We’re here for you dudes, even if you’re not quite there for yourself yet 🤝”?
Does that trust come through the legal forgiveness of a sheriff overlooking the misdemeanor crime of a drunk teenager?
Kirsch admits that there is no perfect formula to eliminate teen drinking. He writes: “People are going to party, prohibition doesn’t work yet providing options does. We provide this option so all lives on the road may benefit.”
Of course, prohibition of alcohol — whether for teens or an entire country — doesn’t work. But that distracts from how these free rides gently sanction teen drinking. The sober rides are a slight but very public enabling.
However, Kirsch’s stated goal is to create safe roadways that are free of drunk teenage drivers. If that is his mission, this impromptu policy announced on social media works as a step in that direction. The subtle permission for teen drinkers simply might be a necessary cost.
When I was a high school teacher, my student journalists interviewed a child psychologist about teen drinking. They asked, “If parents drink with their teenagers in controlled ways during high school, is that a good way to minimize alcohol abuse later in life?” The psychologist was flummoxed by the question. No, she said, drinking early in life is a leading indicator of later alcohol abuse, so any implicit approval for it is consequential, especially during teenage years.
The comment section on Facebook voices this exact worry: “Thanks for encouraging underage drinking…. No more Ubers the wabunsee (sic) sheriff’s office will do it free of charge and listen to your drunken dreams and goals yay good job guys 🤣”
Is the sheriff smartly trading tipsy teen drivers for teens who feel liberated to be “drunk as hell”?
Another anecdote from my high school teaching days provides my personal answer. Each October I supervised the fall dance with about 700 students celebrating in the school gymnasium.
A few hours into the dance, students literally leaned against the doors, eager to start partying in basements with their own bottles of Boone’s Farm. After I released the students and after the chaperones left, I sat in the bleachers of the gymnasium surrounded by drooping streamers and deflated balloons. The DJ packed his speakers into the back of his van. Through the open doors, traffic whirred past.
That’s when I would hear the sirens.
I bowed my head. I hoped the police car wasn’t responding to the accident of a drunk student driver. I sometimes prayed in those moments to keep all of those young people safe.
The ones I worried about the most had driven themselves to the dance, packing into sedans with corsages on their wrists and beers in their bellies. “Please keep them safe,” I thought.
The ones I worried about less? Students who wobbled onto party buses with drivers to deliver them home. Or students who arranged rides with parents. If they insisted on drinking, at least they would be safe.
So, I hear you, Sheriff Kirsch. In the realm of teen drinking, there is no silver bullet (Well, maybe one). There is only ambiguity and a hope for safety.
Author: Eric Thomas
Eric Thomas teaches visual journalism and photojournalism at the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. He is the former director of the Jayhawk Media Workshop and former executive director of the Kansas Scholastic Press Association, a nonprofit that supports student journalism throughout the state. He lives in Leawood with his wife and two children.
Excerpts or more from this article, originally published on Kansas Reflector appear in this post. Republished, with permission, under a Creative Commons License.
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