Jerry Seabrook is a statistic.

Or, rather, he used to be.

On June 23, he was a drunken driver. On Aug. 9, he wasn't.

Trouble is, nobody bothered to change the numbers. But let's take this from the top.

It's a beautiful Saturday afternoon, early summer, in a cozy middle-class neighborhood in Wadsworth.

Life is good. Seabrook is 70 years old now, retired and plays a lot of golf. When he's not on the links, he and his wife are probably at the local public library, delivering Meals on Wheels or immersed in a project at Grace Lutheran Church.

The guy has paid his dues. He grew up poor in the Dover area, worked his way through college, served in the Army, taught school for six years and then spent the bulk of his working life, 32 years, as a pension analyst at Bridgestone-Firestone.

Now that the kids are gone, the Seabrooks do a lot of socializing. So late that June afternoon, they hop into his 2002 Ford Escape and head to the home of longtime friends in the former Northampton Township area of Cuyahoga Falls.

Another couple has been invited, too, and the six of them begin a pleasant get-together.

The initial topic is the news about Jesse Marie Davis, whose body has just been found not far from the house. Seabrook mentions seeing a slew of police cars on Bath Road.

When the host offers cocktails, Seabrook asks for a Manhattan. His wife, Shirley, usually has one glass of wine before switching to coffee, but on this day she is taking a prescription medication and doesn't want to mix it with alcohol.

The group gathers around the television to watch the 6 o'clock news. When the newscast is over, they head out to the patio to chat. About 20 minutes later, Seabrook finishes his drink.

The host pours him another. Before Seabrook can finish that one, the guests are summoned to the screened-in porch for dinner. He finishes his second drink while feasting on eggplant Parmesan.

After dinner, it's back to the TV to watch the Cleveland Indians. The Tribe is losing until the ninth, when Victor Martinez hits a dramatic three-run homer.

In the afterglow of that happy ending, the Seabrooks thank their hosts and head home.

Roughly halfway back to Wadsworth, as they're driving south on state Route 21 in Copley Township, they come over a rise and encounter a ''sobriety checkpoint.''

The area is lit up like a high-school football field.

Seabrook isn't the least bit worried. He finished his second drink a little after 7 p.m., and now it's nearly 11. He's a big fellow, too 244 pounds.

So even though a Manhattan is a strong drink (whiskey and vermouth), he knows he is far below the legal limit.

''I've always tried to be a law-abiding citizen,'' Seabrooks says. ''When (the officer) said, 'Have you had any alcohol to drink today?' I said, 'Yeah, I had two Manhattans before dinner.'

''And immediately a flashlight goes into my eyes. He takes a pen and says, 'Keep your head still and follow this.'

''Then he says, 'Pull down there.'

''We sit there for a while, and he asks me to get out. He said, 'I'd like you to take nine steps forward, heel-to-toe, pivot, and walk nine steps back.' So I counted, pivoted and came back.

''We stood there a little while longer and he said, 'Do you think you can count from 42, fifteen digits back?' I said, 'Yeah, I can count farther than that.' I started in no problem.''

Not so fast

But the officer, James Dawson of the Barberton Police Department one of 20 Summit County law-enforcement agencies that participate in the Summit County OVI Task Force doesn't think Seabrook's movements are rock solid. He takes the man's driver's license and directs him to a trailer, where he is asked to take a Breathalyzer test.

Seabrook gladly complies, and blows a 0.049 way below the legal limit of 0.08. ''I guess I'm OK to go,'' he says.

Dawson, who is making $38 an hour in voluntary overtime pay, disagrees. He tells Seabrook to sit tight while he writes a ticket for OVI Operating a Vehicle under the Influence of alcohol.

On the citation, he plugs in the code 4511.19 A1A and tells Seabrook that if he is found guilty in court he could lose his license for six months and be sent to a rehab school.

Seabrook is dumbfounded.

Dawson hands back the license and instructs Shirley Seabrook to drive home.

The next day, the ''drunken driver'' drops in on a neighbor who is a lifelong friend and a judge. He shows the Breathalyzer printout and the citation, upon which Dawson has written: ''Odor of alcoholic beverage. Admits to drinking. Glassy eyes.''

The friend recommends hiring an attorney. So Seabrook hooks up with David Jack of Wadsworth.

The next day, Seabrook picks up his Akron Beacon Journal and reads about himself. He's not in there by name but as one of five people arrested for ''operating a motor vehicle under the influence of alcohol.''

His court date is two days away, but his lawyer gets a continuance. And Seabrook continues to stew.

Finally, on the day of the pretrial hearing, the Seabrooks meet the lawyer outside the courtroom. Jack and the prosecutor go into the judge's chambers and emerge less than 15 minutes later. Jack tells Seabrook: ''You're free to go. It's been dismissed.''

In other words, Seabrook was not driving under the influence of alcohol. But now he's out $750 in legal fees with no recourse for reimbursement.

The checkpoint also ruined what would have been a pleasant Saturday evening. Not only was he detained for an hour (records show he was stopped at 10:54 p.m. and the breath test was given at 11:46), but he spent the next 47 days worrying about losing his license.

If you ask me, the cop who charged Seabrook with drunken driving should be docked $750.

Naturally, his boss disagrees.

Barberton Police Chief Michael Kallai admits that Seabrook was the victim of ''an unfortunate set of circumstances,'' but defends the checkpoints.

(Kallai said the officer did not want to be interviewed.)

''The gentlemen who are out there, the OVI Task Force, are doing their job,'' Kallai says. ''They're stopping traffic, they're checking people and, based on their investigation at that time, this warranted them citing him for driving while intoxicated.''

Just doing his job. Problem is, as Seabrook's lawyer notes, this is not the way America is supposed to work.

Different view

''I don't like the whole idea of the OVI checkpoint,'' Jack says. ''I understand the legal rationalization, why the (U.S.) Supreme Court would uphold that (in a split vote). But to me it's just a fiction used to check people for DUI. And when they do, oftentimes they're overzealous.

''They could have just put this guy back in his car and let him go. He clearly wasn't drinking. He had no bad driving pattern. He had no really significant negativity or much that would make you think he was intoxicated. He just had the odor of alcohol on his breath.''

Obviously, the prosecutor had issues with the arrest, too.

Barberton Prosecutor David Fish says that once an officer makes a decision to request a breath test, the driver is technically under arrest and ''the die is cast'' because most officers are highly reluctant to release someone even with a low reading.

Before administrating the breath test, the cop must make a judgment call. In a normal OVI stop, his judgment is based on a number of factors: bad driving, an odor of alcohol, the eye test and the field test. But at a sobriety checkpoint, the officer is robbed of his first, most important clue bad driving. That means he has less to go by when trying to assess someone's condition.

''(Dawson) is a very dependable, very competent officer,'' Fish says. ''He made a difficult decision out at the scene. . . . He just didn't feel comfortable placing this guy back on the road.''

Fish's decision was much easier. ''When we took a look at the case and saw it was a sobriety checkpoint that didn't really change our view, but there were things that weren't available to us. There was no evidence of bad driving. We don't have a guy who is staggering. . . .

''A prosecutor's job is to do justice. Justice demanded we dismiss the charges.''

Leader undeterred

The director of the Summit County OVI Task Force isn't fazed.

When it comes to checkpoints, ''I don't have any mixed emotions,'' says Jeff Buck, whose main job is serving as police chief of Reminderville, a burg wedged between Twinsburg, Aurora and Solon.

''I think that we're doing the residents of Summit County and everyone just an enormous amount of good.''

Sitting in his tiny office, he fixes you with a steady gaze and says, ''I think we're getting people off the road that are killing people when they're drunk, that are driving without insurance, that are driving while they're suspended.

''We're taking people off the roads that have guns, that are carrying concealed weapons, that have felony warrants.''

Perhaps the word ''sobriety'' should be modified.

Summit is one of 10 counties in the state getting roughly $150,000 a year to run these roadblocks. The counties are selected by looking at the statistics for fatal alcohol-related crashes. (Not that those stats are flawless: If you are legally drunk and stopped at a red light, and a sober driver crashes into you from behind, that is classified as an ''alcohol-related'' crash.)

The money comes from the federal government and is handed out in the form of state grants. But the program is not federally mandated. In fact, 11 states won't have anything to do with it.

Summit's OVI director trots out the battle cry of those who would trample your Fourth Amendment rights: ''Driving is a privilege, not a right.''

Wrong. Seabrook's taxes helped pay for Route 21. He has every right to drive on it unmolested if he's not breaking any laws.

Not effective

These roadblocks aren't even catching many drunks.

That night in Copley, the task force questioned 2,422 drivers and found only five er, make that four drunks (assuming the two whose cases have not yet been resolved are guilty).

Among the five charged, the highest blood-alcohol content was a hefty 0.176. The next highest was 0.145 which, as recently as 1982, was below the legal limit.

The task force's lousy drunk-catching percentage on June 23 is the norm. In a 2005 case in the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, dissenting justice Russell Nigro cited stats showing that roving patrols are nearly 11 times more effective than checkpoints at catching drunks.

His colleague, Justice Max Baer, noted another problem: ''The statistics, while clearly proving the relative ineffectiveness of suspicionless checkpoints, do not in any way account for the substantial intrusion that those checkpoints impose on the lives of law-abiding motorists, who often wait in the backlog of traffic caused by the checkpoints even before enduring the actual stop by police once they reach the checkpoint.''

No kidding. You can't stop every car on a highway like state Route 21 without creating a significant traffic jam.

Proponents of the roadblocks are fond of saying the whole stop takes less than a minute. OVI director Buck says he's averaging 28 seconds per car. But nobody ever calculates the amount of time you have to wait in line to get to the checkpoint itself.

Buck admits traffic jams can be an issue. He says he periodically does ''a flush'' to clear out long lines.

Scare tactics

The OVI boss also insists stats don't tell the whole story. ''Voluntary compliance through risk of apprehension'' is his term for scaring people into not drinking and driving.

Well, he sure got Jerry Seabrook's attention.

In fact, the biggest damage to Seabrook was not to his wallet. The biggest damage came to his perception of his country, the country he served, the country in which he thought he could move about freely.

A search of the Summit County Criminal Justice Information System reveals that Jerald Seabrook did have one prior brush with the law: a speeding ticket in 1997.

(Actually, another listing pops up, too: a ''DUI'' issued in June. You have to click on the case number to learn that that charge was dismissed. He wanted to have it expunged until he found out that would cost him another $50.)

''I'd just hate to see somebody else get put into the predicament I'm in,'' he says. ''But that's what's going to happen, I'm afraid.''

Jerry Seabrook is the face of Middle America. He belongs in a Norman Rockwell painting, sitting on the front porch, waving to the neighbor kid riding by on his bicycle.

If we are indiscriminantly stopping, detaining and charging people like Jerry Seabrook, we have taken a wrong turn on our journey to sober streets.