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posted by martyb on Tuesday July 26 2016, @12:12PM   Printer-friendly
from the I'm-positive-there-are-false-positives dept.

Pro Publica and The New York Times Magazine have each written about field drug testing by U.S. law enforcement agencies. The tests are undertaken with disposable kits containing chemicals. A sample is brought into contact with the chemicals and there may be a colour change, which is assessed by the officer. The essay tells the story of people against whom criminal charges regarding illegal drugs were filed, with the results of these field testing kits as the primary evidence in the prosecutions.

According to the essay, the use of the kits has various pitfalls which can lead to false positive results. For one thing, analytes which are legal to possess can produce the same colour change as illegal substances. For another, poor lighting which may be encountered in the field can distort the officer's perception of colours. Confirmation bias can occur. Also, officers may receive inadequate (or--the submitter supposes--incorrect) training in the interpretation of the colours. A former Houston police chief offered the opinion that

Officers shouldn't collect and test their own evidence, period. I don't care whether that's cocaine, blood, hair.

The essay mentions gas chromatography–mass spectroscopy (GC-MS), an instrumental method which is typically undertaken in a laboratory, as providing more reliable results. The submitter notes that portable GC-MS equipment does exist (1, 2).

Nationwide, 62 percent of forensics labs do not conduct further testing in cases in which a field drug test was used and the defendant made a guilty plea. However, the Houston crime laboratory has been doing such testing. They have found that false positives are commonplace. The district attorney's office for Harris County, Texas, which handles cases from Houston, has been informed about those test results and is undertaking "efforts to overturn wrongful convictions." In three years, about as many such convictions have been overturned in Harris County as in the rest of the United States.

Referenced stories:


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday July 27 2016, @12:52AM

    by Thexalon (636) on Wednesday July 27 2016, @12:52AM (#380539)

    Keep them po' folks locked up

    It's more specific than that: A major purpose of the US criminal justice system is to give black men criminal records so that they can legally be discriminated against for the rest of their lives. They are far more likely to be framed up for drugs, charged for drugs when they are actually caught with them (and this matches personal experience - I know white people caught with pot who were let go by the cops), convicted when they are charged, and punished when they are convicted (again, other white people I know were allowed to go free with no criminal record if their parents put them through a rehab program).

    Once saddled with a misdemeanor drug charge, good luck getting a job as a black man in America. So now you have no legal means of working, and are in many cases ineligible for public assistance. So that leaves you doing some sort of street hustle like selling CDs or loose cigarettes. Oh, but guess what, doing that will get you killed by the cops. So if you're going to be killed by the cops anyways if you're caught, you might as well sell something much more profitable like drugs. And now you're a felon, and either killed by the cops, or by a rival drug gang, or you're arrested, thrown in jail, disenfranchised, and even less likely to find work when you get out. So now your best option is a career in crime.

    And this is still relevant:

    "Look, we understood we couldn't make it illegal to be young or poor or black in the United States, but we could criminalize their common pleasure. We understood that drugs were not the health problem we were making them out to be, but it was such a perfect issue...that we couldn't resist it."
    - John Ehrlichman, White House counsel to Richard Nixon

    --
    The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
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  • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday July 27 2016, @01:03AM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday July 27 2016, @01:03AM (#380545) Journal

    Oh, I'm aware of all of that, but white boys also run afoul of almost all the same things. It's all about class, with poor blacks at the bottom of the food chain, and rich whites at the top of the food chain.

    I can attest to the fact that once a young white male has been "indoctrinated" into the system, he is trapped in it. He doesn't have much chance of getting a "good" job, and he has all the same challenges that the young black male has. The ONLY advantage he has over the black male is, he won't be discriminated against for the color of his face.

    • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday July 27 2016, @01:25AM

      by Thexalon (636) on Wednesday July 27 2016, @01:25AM (#380559)

      The ONLY advantage he has over the black male is, he won't be discriminated against for the color of his face.

      And that matters a lot:
      - He's much more likely to avoid the criminal trouble I discussed earlier, solely because he's white.
      - He's much more likely to be able to get a blue-collar job, for example on construction crews.
      - If he somehow manages to work his way up through hard work and education, he'll be able to pretend to be someone like me who was born upper-middle-class, and be treated accordingly.
      - If he really really makes good, he'll be treated as a member of the rich elite for the rest of his life.

      Contrast that with a black kid who works his way up through sheer talent and hard work and education from nothing to be president of the United States, and is still treated by a lot of the country like an uppity n*****.

      --
      The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.