Daniel Rushing buys a Krispy Kreme doughnut every other week. (July 27, 2016) (Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda / Orlando Sentinel)
Orlando cops decided to arrest a 64 year old man who was guilty of driving and doughnut eating – everyone be careful, if you’re going to do the same, stay away from the glazed!
Daniel Rushing treats himself to a Krispy Kreme doughnut every other Wednesday. He used to eat them in his car.
Not anymore.
Not since a pair of Orlando police officers pulled him over, spotted four tiny flakes of glaze on his floorboard and arrested him, saying they were pieces of crystal methamphetamine. The officers did two roadside drug tests and both came back positive for the illegal substance, according to his arrest report.
He was handcuffed, arrested, taken to the county jail and strip searched, he said. A state crime lab, however, did another test several weeks later and cleared him.
“It was incredible,” he said. “It feels scary when you haven’t done anything wrong and get arrested. … It’s just a terrible feeling.”
[…]
That’s when she spotted “a rock like substance on the floor board where his feet were,” she wrote. “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.
She asked for permission to search his vehicle, the report says, and Rushing agreed. “I didn’t have anything to hide,” he said. “I’ll never let anyone search my car again.”
Riggs-Hopkins and other officers spotted three other pieces of the suspicious substance in his car, according to the report.
“I kept telling them, ‘That’s … glaze from a doughnut. … They tried to say it was crack cocaine at first, then they said, ‘No, it’s meth, crystal meth.'” His arrest report confirms that he tried to tell them.
[…]
She booked him into the county jail on a charge of possession of methamphetamine with a firearm. He was locked up for about 10 hours before his release on $2,500 bond, he said.
According to FDLE, an analyst in its Orlando crime lab did not try to identify what police found in his car. She only checked to determine whether it was an illegal drug and confirmed that it was not.
Three days later, the State Attorney’s Office in Orlando filed paperwork, saying that it was dropping the case.
Rushing, who retired after 25 years as an Orlando parks department employee, has hired a lawyer and is asking the city to pay him damages.
“I got arrested for no reason at all,” he said.
[…]
The Orlando Police Department did not explain why the two drug field tests that Riggs-Hopkins conducted were wrong.
When asked how many other road-side drug tests have produced false positive results, an OPD spokeswoman wrote, “At this time, we have no responsive records. … There is no mechanism in place for easily tracking the number of, or results of, field drug testing.”
FDLE spokeswoman Molly Best wrote that her agency has no information about the prevalence of false-positive field drug tests.
The New York Times reported on July 7 that its review of FDLE data showed that 21 percent of the time, drug evidence that was listed by local authorities as methamphetamine turned out to be something else.
In its statement, OPD described the arrest as a lawful one.
Full story at the Orlando Sentinel.
This is a huge, huge problem: you have to know if your test is reliable or not, because if it isn’t, and you’re using it, you’re wasting resources (time, personnel, materials, community trust). If it is reliable, then you have to have a mechanism to verify potential false positive results within a minimum span of time, otherwise you’re losing out on the biggest resource of all (community trust).
Of course, we all know how resource-conscious USAnian police forces are.
Those kits are well known for their false positives and are simply used as a pretense for an arrest. The vast majority of people arrested using these kits can’t afford to post bail and end up pleading guilty and accepting a plea bargain to get out of jail when their initial hearing comes along. The “drug” is therefore never properly tested, and the person (most often poor and a minority) gets a criminal record after already having lost their job for not showing up while in jail.
These things need to be outlawed now. It’s yet one more injustice in our so-called justice system. Finally a white man with enough money for a lawyer got caught up in this particular scam, so maybe someone will take notice.
Well . . . maybe doughnuts are considered a narcotic to police officers, but to the general public, that is not usually the case.
Johnson catman:
I rarely eat doughnuts, I can’t even remember the last time I had one, but when I do eat a lovely fresh doughnut, yeah, I could see them being…addictive. Even so, they are legal! :D
What can I say? I’m glad the guy is alive!
Giliell @5:
I think his pigmentation may have something to do with that.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/10/magazine/how-a-2-roadside-drug-test-sends-innocent-people-to-jail.html?_r=0
Wait…
Is that actually how cops word things in their reports? That’s very odd. On the other hand, we now know that after eleven years of training and experience, she can’t differentiate narcotics from doughnut flakings.
Tabby @ 8:
Meaning her training amounts to jack shit.
@8 & 9, yup, jack shit indeed. That is how (many) cops are trained to write reports. It’s supposed to formalise why they had due cause to undertake their chosen cause of action. Problem is that this retrospective writing is also very prone to overreach by embellishment, as we see here.
My original training was as an analytical chemist. I’d hesitate to call a white micro-crystalline or glassy material anything at all without good circumstantial evidence to begin with and some solid analytical tools to finish. If the guy had stacks of plastic bags full of white powder in his car that tested positive that might make me think an arrest would be justified, but a few flakes of something along with a perfectly reasonable explanation…
Neither crack cocaine nor crystal methamphetamine qualifies as a “narcotic” unless you redefine that word to mean “any kind of banned drug whatsoever”. After another eleven years, the officer involved might have learned enough to write a whole new dictionary.
She might make a further breakthrough by redefining numbers -- the linked story describes her as
Pierce @ 11:
That’s how cops and feds do define it. Hence the word ‘narc’.