Orlando, FL — Thanks to the highly flawed means of testing for drugs and incompetent armed agents of the state enforcing immoral drug laws, a man’s donut got him arrested, strip searched, thrown in a cage and drug charges.
Tens of thousands have been convicted and served time — even earning the black mark of a felony — for crimes they likely didn’t commit, a recent report found, because the cases against them relied on horribly unreliable field drug test kits.
So prone to errors are the tests, courts won’t allow their submission as evidence. However, their continued use by law enforcement — coupled with a 90 percent rate at which drug cases are resolved through equally dubious plea deals — needlessly ruins thousands of lives.
Daniel Rushing, of Orlando, is one of these people.
Last December, Rushing, 64, was bringing his friend to his weekly chemotherapy session when he was stopped by police for the alleged ‘crime’ of not stopping all the way before pulling out of a gas station.
This routine revenue generating stop would quickly descend into a nightmare after this highly trained police officer would see the crumbs of a Krispy Kreme donut on Rushing’s floor board.
The officer, Cpl. Shelby Riggs-Hopkins spotted “a rock like substance on the floor board where his feet were,” she wrote, according to a report in the Orlando Sentinel.
Her ‘professional’ training that has taught her how to identify all the substances deemed illegal by the state immediately set off alarms.
“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.
Rushing, who is a concealed carry permit holder told the officer that there was a weapon in the car. Luckily he was not shot. However, he was asked to step out of the car and then the officer asked to search his vehicle.
Rushing, knowing that he had nothing to hide, agreed to the search. Even though Rushing had nothing to hide, he should have never agreed to a search as this is rule number one when dealing with police during a traffic stop.
After the fact, however, Rushing realized his mistake in allowing the officer to rummage through his car. “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.'”
The arrest report even noted Rushing pleaded with officers to tell them it was donut crumbs. However, they just knew that this 64-year-old man, with no criminal record, was some drug kingpin transporting meth by dropping tiny bits of it on his carpet.
“Rushing stated that the substance is sugar from a Krispie Kreme Donut that he ate,” Riggs-Hopkins wrote.
Officers then tested the Krispy Kreme crumbs with their criminally unreliable field test kits and received not one but two positive results.
As the Free Thought Project has previously reported, the director of a lab recognized by the International Association of Chiefs of Police for forensic science excellence has called field drug testing kits “totally useless” due to the possibility of false positives. In laboratory experiments, at least two brands of field testing kits have been shown to produce false positives in tests of Mucinex, chocolate, aspirin, chocolate, and oregano. Some of these kits even return a positive when completely empty.
According to the Orlando Sentinel, Riggs-Hopkins 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.
“I got arrested for no reason at all,” he said.
After being kidnapped and caged because of the incompetence of police officers and the brutal drug war, Rushing has decided to sue. He will undoubtedly win and the taxpayers will be held accountable — not the police officers.
When asked how many other road-side drug tests have produced false positive results by the Orlando Sentinel, 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.
As police across the US scramble to push the war on cops narrative and note that only criminals dislike the police, thousands of cases like this one play out every year. Instead of rectifying a broken system, the overwhelming majority of police and politicians ignore the problems created by the war on drugs and choose to increase force instead.
Until we bring an end to the war on drugs, innocent people like Bernstein and Cruz will continue to be targetted and continue to be kidnapped, caged, or killed — for no other reason than cops looking for arbitrary substances.
Next time someone says, “if you don’t break the law, you have nothing to fear,” show them this incident which completely destroys that dangerously ignorant narrative.
