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  • 2016-08-04 (xsd:date)
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  • Florida Officer Mistakes Donut Glaze for Methampetamines (en)
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  • In December 2015, Daniel Frederick Rushing was arrested when he was leaving a 7-Eleven in Orlando, Florida. That particular convenience store is apparently a locus of illegal activity, and since Rushing had been in and out of it a few times that day, police were suspicious. They pulled him over, found a few flakes of a rock like substance that looked suspicious on his floorboard, and — according to the police report — arrested him for possession of methamphetamine after a field test: The rock-like substance, as it turned out, really was glaze from the Krispy Kreme donut that Rushing had been eating as he was driving one friend to the hospital for a chemotherapy appointment, before picking up another friend who needed a ride home. Rushing was jailed for ten hours. It was incredible, he told reporters: Several weeks after Rushing's arrest, the lab reports came back showing no trace of methamphetamines or any other types of illegal substances. He has now hired a lawyer, and plans to sue the city because he was arrested for no reason at all. (Orlando police said that the arrest was lawful.) It's not the first time field tests have mistaken sugary substances for methamphetamines or crack cocaine. In July 2016, investigative journalist outfit ProPublica found that up to half of the positive results from the $2 drug kits Florida police use for field testing are later invalidated: According to a 2015 story published by The Marshall Project, a reporting initiative about the United States criminal justice system, the tests yield false positives at least five percent of the time: In Austin, Texas, the field tests law enforcement was using yielded so many false positives that they stopped relying on field tests for drug-related indictments in 2013, instead returning to far slower lab test results for suspected drug offenses. No central agency regulates what drug tests are used in police departments, and there are no centralized or comprehensive records about their use. In October 2016, Rushing sued the city of Orlando and The Safariland Group, which manufactures and distributes the drug testing kits used by Orlando police. He is seeking more than $15,000 in damages. (en)
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