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Retired Police Officer Guesses Who’s Drunk Out Of A Lineup

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A retired cop stares down a lineup of strangers, and only one of them is actually drunk.

BuzzFeed Video’s latest lineup gimmick swaps out the usual celebrity panel for something sharper: a former police officer reading real behavior instead of a script. The setup is simple and the stakes feel real even though nobody’s getting arrested — one person in the group has been drinking, and it’s up to the officer to sniff them out using nothing but instinct and technique built over more than a decade on the job.

• The video, titled “Retired Police Officer Guesses Who’s Drunk Out Of A Lineup,” was produced by Taylor Patterson for BuzzFeed Video.
• The officer featured, Jim Huertas, spent 12 years in law enforcement before taking on the challenge.
• Huertas relies on interviews, behavioral observation, and informal field sobriety checks — eye movement, balance, speech, physical demeanor — to pick the intoxicated person out of the lineup.

The Setup

There’s no breathalyzer waiting in the wings and no clipboard full of blood alcohol readings. Huertas walks the line the way he would on a call: talking to each person, watching how they hold themselves, listening for the small slips in speech that tip someone off. It’s the same toolkit patrol officers lean on before they ever reach for a Breathalyzer — read the person first, confirm it after.

What makes the format work is that it strips away everything except the read. No badge, no traffic stop, no legal consequence hanging over the moment — just a former officer trying to prove that twelve years of instinct still holds up when the pressure’s gone but the skill is still there.

Reading the Room, One Person at a Time

Huertas moves through the group individually, asking questions that seem casual but are doing real work — the kind of small talk that gives someone under the influence a chance to slur a word, lose their train of thought, or overcorrect for something they think they’re hiding. He watches how each person tracks his questions, whether their eyes drift, whether their balance holds when they’re not thinking about it.

Twelve years on the street teaches you to watch what people do when they think no one’s grading them.

It’s the same logic behind the standard field sobriety test, just without the cones or the walk-the-line routine. Huertas is essentially running an abbreviated, conversational version of the checks officers use roadside, betting that the tells show up just as clearly in a living-room lineup as they do on the shoulder of a highway.

The Effectiveness of This Format

BuzzFeed has built a whole run of these professional-guessing videos — cops, doctors, therapists, forensic experts, all pointed at a lineup of strangers and asked to call out the truth. The appeal is obvious: it turns expertise into a spectator sport, letting viewers watch a trained eye do in minutes what most people couldn’t do at all. Fans of the network’s interrogation-style comedy bits, like the tonal opposite found in CIA Interrogation – Key & Peele, know the format thrives on tension between confident performance and quiet, telling detail.

The same goes for the appeal of watching someone try to keep their composure under a spotlight, a dynamic that shows up in plenty of other viral “hold it together on camera” clips, including the chaos of Funniest Interview Ever as actors go off the rails. Huertas isn’t chasing laughs, but the tension is the same — someone’s trying not to give themselves away, and the camera’s rolling the whole time.

By the end of the video, Huertas has made his call, and the reveal is the payoff the format is built around — did twelve years of street experience actually translate to reading a room full of strangers who all know they’re being watched.