OXFORD – Last week, when one of his officers pulled over a suspected drunk driver, Oxford Police Chief Richard Nolan said he wasn’t worried about the case.

During the 25-minute traffic stop and sobriety test, while the suspect was intermittently confrontational and slurred incoherent complaints, the officer was polite and sympathetic.

The man failed to complete any of the balancing sobriety tests and uncontrollably trembled in his steps while trying walk a straight line. The suspect forgot his instructions and laughed at his own inability to remember them for more than a minute at a time before asking the officer to repeat the orders for a fourth time.

Each time the policeman slowly repeated himself and gave the man a fair chance to complete the tests before eventually announcing to the suspect that he believed him to be intoxicated.

Nolan knows this is how things unfolded and he isn’t concerned because the entire scene was captured on DVD by an in-car camera and a microphone in the officer’s pocket. Watching the video, he hears almost every word that was clearly spoken – or slurred.

From the police station in the Village of Oxford, Nolan reviewed the tape with the officer in the video, Ronald Martin, pointing out different aspects of the incident in a sort of post-game review.