because those are similar
Man spent four days in jail because police confused tortilla dough with cocaine.
13 Responses to “because those are similar”
Remember, I do this to entertain me, not you.
Uncle Pays the Bills
 |
|
Find Local
|
Categories
- ATF (769)
- Death Match (10)
- Eminent Domain (225)
- In the bag (9)
- Notes to Junior (546)
- Poker (74)
- Recipes (142)
- Shotgun Noob (11)
- The Airing of Grievances (19)
- uncategorized (47,725)
May 10th, 2011 at 10:08 am
Those are the NC cops I remember… Corrupt and stupid…
May 10th, 2011 at 10:20 am
Tortilla powder might field test positive for Cocaine. Sounds silly, but Slim Fast does. So does Tylenol.
May 10th, 2011 at 11:11 am
Squares should not be allowed to be cops.
May 10th, 2011 at 12:04 pm
Ignoring for the sake of argument my views about the “War on (some) Drugs”, and assuming the police aren’t lying, this looks like a combination of three factors: 1) he did just about everything wrong in dealing with the police, including having to be forcibly removed from his vehicle; 2) his innocent activity happened to very closely resemble one of the innocent activities that drug dealers routinely use to disguise their smuggling; and 3) the police received false positives from three separate tests made by three different companies each conducted by different deputies.
Number 3 is the part I initially found hard to believe, but I did a quick Google search after reading what Jeff said and found this (PDF warning). From page 8 of the PDF (labeled as p. 4 of the report):
[emphasis mine]
Given that the police are being told by their superiors, the courts, and supposedly reputable scientists that these tests are 100% reliable, plus Mr. Hernandez’s behaviour when they encountered him, the strong resemblance of his activities to what drug smugglers do to hide their cargo, and the fact that they had reason to believe he wouldn’t stick around if he was released, I can’t say that it was completely unreasonable to hold him like they did.
May 10th, 2011 at 12:57 pm
Jake. I have had many enjoyable times with the NC police and this is standard procedure. Called my mother and told her about it. She laughed and laughed saying that sounds like the police she knows…
In north carolina unless you have the police dead to rights they will not listen to anything you have to say plus they have their own system of doing things… Notice how he was threatened with 40 years in prison while at the same time they were sending off the “drugs” to be tested.. My guess is the guy was guilty of breaking down while brown in Asheville. They thought they had something even though their training told them otherwise. I was pulled over just outside asheville by a trooper for a tail light out. He let me go after I came back clean. Immediately checked the tail light and found it working.. Surprise surprise.
May 10th, 2011 at 1:04 pm
Am I the only one who saw it was dough? DOUGH. As in, a semi-sticky substance like playdough or bread dough or pizza dough.
Maybe I’m behind the times, but I thought cocaine was not a semi-sticky pliable substance. It would make it hard to sniff.
Oh, and if a cop pulled up behind me to render assistance, grabbed a sack full of groceries, accused me of being a high-volume drug seller and ordered me out of the car at gunpoint, I’d be pretty pissed off.
We’ll never have all the facts, but if pulling off to the side and turning on your hazard lights after your car experiences a mechanical malfunction is now suspicious and amounts to probable cause, we’re screwed.
May 10th, 2011 at 2:42 pm
@ John Smith: Well, I did say IF the police aren’t lying. And really, if you had 3 positive tests by 3 different people that you trusted, and you were assured by people who should know and who you had no reason to believe were lying that the tests were completely accurate, wouldn’t you assume it was cocaine even if it didn’t look like it could be?
@ workinwifdakids: Considering some of the other things the smugglers have done, it wouldn’t surprise me at all to hear that they found a way to disguise cocaine as dough. Heck, they could probably have a loss rate of 50% of the product in the process of reconstituting it to a usable form, and still make a decent profit.
May 10th, 2011 at 3:35 pm
Jake: I think the lime in the masa harina was just setting the test off.
Which is why you never talk to cops, and wait for your lawyer … if the test says cocaine, they will always assume cocaine is hidden in whatever it is.
If they think you are driving while brown, the dog will puck up on the handler’s suspicion and bark … not because there are drugs present, but because they have been praised in the past for barking at brown people.
May 10th, 2011 at 3:41 pm
That it was reported as “dough” doesn’t mean it wasn’t “flour”.
Which is like two orders of magnitude more plausible, though still ridiculous – unless it really does, for some stupid reason, field test as “cocaine”.
May 10th, 2011 at 5:24 pm
As a medical physicist, we spend a fair amount of time considering where to set the thresholds in medical tests. You want to minimize both false positives and false negatives.
If you get a cancer screening, and I miss a cancer, you can die. If I give you a false positive, you get a round of chemo at great pain, injury and expense, for no benefit. So I want to make the test as accurate as possible, then think long and hard about erroneous results, minimizing harm from the errors on both sides.
From everything I have read, the tests are deliberately set to minimize false negatives (i.e., a crook gets away) while not worrying about false positives (i.e. an innocent person spends four days in the cooler), because a false positive can give the cop a reason to make an arrest, search the car, and maybe find something else.
There is no incentive to make a useful, valid test. There is an incentive to make a tool to promote easy arrests. So guess what they make?
May 10th, 2011 at 6:19 pm
And I have to live here (in Asheville)…
Not only did the three tests missfire, the drug dog also “alerted”.
The city PD also a big scandal with a bunch of evidence missing from evidence locker.
May 10th, 2011 at 9:00 pm
Jake you have to look at other things. The police admitted something was up and not in the illegal way. Plus drug couriers rarely bring their dogs with them. This guy would have to be the most naive courier in the world. Police look especially for california or western state plates. That is why the couriers pass off their loads before they get to the east coast. My sister married a hispanic man and briefly moved to NC. He was pulled over 3 times in less than a week for random traffic offenses which were bogus and no tickets written. Brown guy driving in a fairly nice vehicle with cali plates does not mean probable cause. The irony of that mess is that he is now a trooper in san antonio.. Now please explain why the cops do not apologize when they are wrong and have made your life a living hell???
May 10th, 2011 at 9:56 pm
#12 John Smith:
To answer your question, same as the Obama administration policy:
“Umm, it’s not fascism when we do it.”