Arrested for meth, the crumbs in his car were Krispy Kreme

[Wendell]

Cpl. Shelby Riggs-Hopkins, an eight-year department veteran, had staked out the 7-Eleven because of complaints about drug activity, she wrote in her report. She pulled over Daniel Rushing because he failed to come to a full stop before pulling out of the convenience store parking lot and because he was driving 42 mph in a 30 mph zone, according to her report. When Rushing opened his wallet, she saw that he had a concealed weapons permit, she wrote. He told her that he had a gun, and she asked him to step out of his car, a small Chevy. 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. "Rushing stated that the substance is sugar from a Krispie Kreme Donut that he ate," Riggs-Hopkins wrote. 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. "I got arrested for no reason at all," Rushing said. "I didn't have anything to hide," he said. "I'll never let anyone search my car again."
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/...727-story.html

[olstyn]

Only a slight logical flaw there; what *actual* drug user would allow drugs to make it onto the floorboard of their vehicle rather than into their body? Rough way to learn the lesson about not consenting to searches sans warrant, though.

[Luke]

Must...resist...donut....cop....jokes.....

[Lon]

Only a slight logical flaw there; what *actual* drug user would allow drugs to make it onto the floorboard of their vehicle rather than into their body? Rough way to learn the lesson about not consenting to searches sans warrant, though.

Seriously? Have you ever actually searched a dopers car? There's a lot of weed, cocaine, meth, heroin, whatever that ends up on the floorboard. And the door pocket. And the ash tray. And under the ash tray. And the center console. And the glovebox. And under the seats. And on the dash board (where else you gonna snort it). And the little compartment under the radio. Oh, yeah. And the drink holders. And under the drink holders. And who knows where else. I mean, we have heroin junkies who are shooting up while they are driving home from their dealers house. You think some of that shit doesn't end up on the floor?

Having said all of that, a simple field test would have been in order. We don't typically charge them with felony dope charges without an actual lab test. Sometimes a field test, by usually not. Prevents this kinda thing.

[voodoo_man]

Female...eleven years of experience....narc activity...

[Shellback]

Reminded me of this article. 21 days in jail for a crumb of a legal substance.

...He opened the lid on the vial and dropped a tiny piece of the crumb into the liquid. If the liquid remained pink, that would rule out the presence of cocaine. If it turned blue, then Albritton, as the owner of the car, could become a felony defendant.

Helms waved the vial in front of her face and said, “You’re busted.”

Albritton was booked into the Harris County jail at 3:37 a.m., nine hours after she was arrested. Wilson had been detained for driving without a license but would soon be released. Albritton was charged with felony drug possession and faced a much longer ordeal...

Data from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement lab system show that 21 percent of evidence that the police listed as methamphetamine after identifying it was not methamphetamine, and half of those false positives were not any kind of illegal drug at all...

The remainder of the “white chunk substance” that Officer Helms had tested positive with his field kit as crack cocaine totaled 0.0134 grams, Barker wrote on the examination sheet, about the same as a tiny pinch of salt.

Barker turned to gas chromatography-mass spectrometry analysis, or GC-MS, the gold standard in chemical identification, to figure out what was in Albritton’s car that evening. She began with the powder. First the gas chromatograph vaporized a speck of the powder inside a tube. Then the gas was heated, causing its core chemical compounds to separate. When the individual compounds reached the end of the tube, the mass spectrometer blasted them with electrons, causing them to fragment. The resulting display, called a fragmentation pattern, is essentially a chemical fingerprint. The powder was a combination of aspirin and caffeine — the ingredients in BC Powder, the over-the-counter painkiller, as Albritton had insisted.

Then Barker ran the same tests on the supposed crack cocaine. The crumb’s fragmentation pattern did not match that of cocaine, or any other compound in the lab’s extensive database. It was not a drug. It did not contain anything mixed with drugs. It was a crumb — food debris, perhaps. Barker wrote “N.A.M.” on the spectrum printout, “no acceptable match,” and then added another set of letters: “N.C.S.” No controlled substance identified. Albritton was innocent...

[Jeep]

Krispy Kreme might be more addictive than meth.

[OlongJohnson]

Just to put it out there...

Imagine if you and a whole bunch of the people you knew were routinely on the receiving end of episodes like those described in this thread, for pretty much your whole life. If virtually everybody you knew had at least one story like this, maybe not as extreme, but generally similar. How would you feel about cops?

[voodoo_man]

Just to put it out there...

Imagine if you and a whole bunch of the people you knew were routinely on the receiving end of episodes like those described in this thread, for pretty much your whole life. If virtually everybody you knew had at least one story like this, maybe not as extreme, but generally similar. How would you feel about cops?

Except this is so rare, it doesnt.

And I'm willing to bet that PD is paying a hefty civil suit for this.

[Peally]

Just to put it out there...

Imagine if you and a whole bunch of the people you knew were routinely on the receiving end of episodes like those described in this thread, for pretty much your whole life. If virtually everybody you knew had at least one story like this, maybe not as extreme, but generally similar. How would you feel about cops?

This isn't quirky news because it's common. I'm willing to bet good money plenty of those people's hypothetical stories were them giving reason for a search and likely having shithead attitudes on top of it.