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from the sometimes-stereotypes-are-inaccurate dept.
AlterNet reports:
A 64-year-old man in Orlando was handcuffed, arrested, strip searched, and spent hours in jail after officers mistook the glaze from his doughnut for crystal meth.
The Orlando Sentinel reports that, after pulling Daniel Rushing over for failure to stop and speeding, Cpl. Shelby Riggs-Hopkins noticed "a rock like substance" on the floorboard of the car. "I recognized through my eleven years of training and experience as a law enforcement officer the substance to be some sort of narcotic", she wrote in her report.
The officers asked if they could search Rushing's vehicle and he agreed. [...] [Rushing said] "They tried to say it was crack cocaine at first, then they said, 'No, it's meth, crystal meth'."
[...] The officers conducted two roadside drug tests on the particles and both came back positive for an illegal substance. A state crime lab made further tests weeks later and cleared him. Rushing says he was locked up for about 10 hours before his release on $2,500 bond.
A cop who can't identify doughnut residue? What is the world coming to?
Previous: Are Questionable Drug Tests Filling U.S. Prisons?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Snow on Friday July 29 2016, @07:03PM
The officers conducted two roadside drug tests on the particles and both came back positive for an illegal substance.
Are the roadside tests really so bad they can't tell the difference between sugar and drugs?
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Friday July 29 2016, @07:09PM
Yes. Read an article on this a month or so back. Evidently the field tests for drugs come up positive for a lot of non-drug things.
My ducks are not in a row. I don't know where some of them are, and I'm pretty sure one of them is a turkey.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Snow on Friday July 29 2016, @07:20PM
Then why even have them? Just buy a glow stick from the dollar store, and if it lights up when snapped, then that's a positive result providing the probable cause needed to violate your rights.
It sure would be a lot cheaper.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by LoRdTAW on Friday July 29 2016, @07:29PM
Remember those phony bomb detectors sold to Iraq? Just another case of selling snake oil.
As for why the police still use it? You have ninnies who are scared of everything and want every bad guy off the street so their precious children can be safe from big bag drug heads. Even if it means inconveniencing a few innocents. They vote. So everyone who wants to keep their job better ensure these fuck heads are happy.
(Score: 3, Funny) by DeathMonkey on Friday July 29 2016, @08:04PM
Remember those phony bomb detectors sold to Iraq? Just another case of selling snake oil.
Better than snake-oil, it's the Probable-Causeulator!
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Friday July 29 2016, @08:45PM
Oooh! Oooh! I need one of those!
It'll look really nice next to my Correlator-Causationnation device.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Friday July 29 2016, @07:40PM
After which, it doubles as a self-illuminating cavity search device, which can be then used to violate you further.
We expect this breakthrough to save our taxpayers and our strained police departments a good deal of money in the continuing war on drugs.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Friday July 29 2016, @08:01PM
No! You throw the person in the water: if they float, they are a witch!...errrr, GUILTY, yeah... Guilty.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 4, Funny) by Snow on Friday July 29 2016, @08:09PM
And if they sink it's because they are black, right?!
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Friday July 29 2016, @08:48PM
As some terrible people would say, "That solves two problems."
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 2) by davester666 on Saturday July 30 2016, @06:57AM
No, black people sink because they just happen to have a bunch of extra bits of lead in them.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday July 29 2016, @09:03PM
Why even have a Drug War?
Well, we forgot to kill off those in power. It's a big oversight.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by mendax on Friday July 29 2016, @08:31PM
This kind of reminds me of something I remember watching in the Dukes of Hazzard TV show in my youth. Boss Hogg took the money from a government grant to buy radar guns and instead bought hand-held hair dryers and a can of spray paint to give them the right color. One wonders if these roadside drug tests are any more reliable than hair dryer radar detectors.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.
(Score: 3, Funny) by bob_super on Friday July 29 2016, @07:10PM
Well, Krispy Kreme donuts are highly addictive, and maybe now we know why.
(Score: 2) by quintessence on Friday July 29 2016, @07:33PM
To be fair, this was about COPS and DONUTS. The distinction between golden fried nuggets of sugar and a highly addictive psychoactive that bestows superpowers and makes your teeth fall out is purely academic.
Not to mention they had just finished their morning "breakfast of champions" and forgot to wash their hands. It was just unseemly to see cops attempting to snort the crystals from the man's shirt. Waste not, want not.
FARK had a Florida tag for a reason. Even if the test were 110% accurate, it was in Florida man. When even the South disowns you, mistaking Krispy Kreme for meth is a minor concern.