TheAgitator.com
Police Dog, “Field Tests” Magically Find Pot, LSD in Chocolate Chip Cookies
Friday, July 11th, 2008As it turns out, they were just plain ol’ chocolate chip cookies.
The initial story about the guy’s arrest was circulated all over the world.
Police officers in Blue Mound didn’t think much of the cookies dropped off at their station Monday night – until they got a whiff of them.
Overpowering the chocolate chips was the pungent smell of marijuana.
“It reeked of it,” said Lt. Thomas Cain, a Blue Mound police spokesman. “It wasn’t hard to tell. Anyone that’s been around marijuana before would have known.”
Makes you wonder what to think the next time this guy writes in a police report that his probable cause to conduct a search was the scent of marijuana coming from a car or apartment, doesn’t it?
Also, why is it that these field tests police use turn up so many false positives? If you’ll remember back a bit, Dallas police had similar problems when the informant they were using was planting ground up pool chalk on targets. Cops doing field tests in those cases claim the tests showed the chalk (also known as sheet rock) to be cocaine. Several times.
Last year in California, a bottle of Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soap came back positive for GHB.
Following my philosophy for life (K.I.S.S.), I’d have to say incompetence.
How do you charge someone with “tampering with consumer goods” over homemade cookies? If this is the case you could arrest someone for accidentally putting in too much salt in cookies at a bake sale.
As far as the field tests go, it all depends on what chemical the test is designed to find. It also depends on the quality of the test itself. Let’s face it, you don’t think that they bought the most expensive test kits on the market, do you?
“It reeked of it,” said Lt. Thomas Cain, a Blue Mound police spokesman. “It wasn’t hard to tell. Anyone that’s been around marijuana before would have known.”
Give me a fucking break. One of the most annoying (to put it mildly) things about cops is how they consider themselves experts in certain things that they actually have no fucking clue about. Prime example: guns. Most cops are appallingly inept with their weapons, yet they automatically assume themselves to be more qualified regarding them than any peasant.
I’ve never had pot cooked into baked goods… would pot cookies actually smell like pot?
Now that it turns out that there wasnt anything in the cookies, have the police come out and made another statement yet? Ya know, the one where they stand by their original claim and refuse to admit they made a mistake? They have so much integrity ya know.
Blcokquote>#1 Nando
Following my philosophy for life (K.I.S.S.), I’d have to say incompetence.
I’d be more inclined to believe it’s incompetence mixed with an unhealthy predisposition to believe people are guilty.
So much for my plan to use nested blockquotes…
“If this is the case you could arrest someone for accidentally putting in too much salt in cookies at a bake sale.”
Hello, does the name Kendra Bull ring a bell?
Interesting how the article implies that pot is a narcotic.
I think the reason that so many screens are false positives is here:
http://yudkowsky.net/bayes/bayes.html
Unfortunately, this is kind of hard to explain.
As for the drug sniffing dog - I don’t know about your dogs, but mine go absolutely bats**t if I even spell the word “cookie” out loud. I’ll bet the dog was alerting to one of its favorite treats! I hope this young man gets a nice apology and dismissal of the rest of his community service. As for the police - they should be banned from getting any kind of free treats from anyone, since they don’t show the proper etiquette for receiving goodies!
Boy, they need to come up with a story and stick to it. Our local media reported the cookies were laced with LSD.
*eye roll*
seriously, does anyone know what a “field test” is? the only ones i know are the sobriety ones … so was this an impression test like the roadside sobriety checks … or is there some sort of “field test kit” like on CSI … ?
and i agree with Lori … what dog DOESN’T get excited when you waive a cookie under its nose? who taught these yahoos how to handle dogs?
It would be pointless to send cops pot as a gift. They already get as much as they want from the evidence room.
What if I got a tip that someone was going to drop off marijuana-infused cookies at the police station? Could I make a citizen’s arrest by throwing some flash-bang grenades through the precinct windows?
I suspect that strong smell of pot is like strong smell of alcohol.A catch phrase to make an arrest or conduct a search.
Yeah, “catch phrase”, as in ,we are the hunters(cops) and you are the catch (citizen).Now shut up and piss in the cup.
#4
I can neither confirm nor deny that I have ever been in the presence of a baked good with marijuana baked into it!
But the answer is: NO
Now shut up and pass the plate you bogarting bastard!
Also, why is it that these field tests police use turn up so many false positives?
My guesses would be that they don’t clean or calibrate their testing device properly, so they keep getting positives on residue from drugs that have been tested; that the sensitivity equipment the buy is skewed to “err on the side of caution”, that is, better to have a false positive than a false negative; The testers themselves are crap (much like many of the the “lie/guilt detection” tech marketed to law enforcement) and police depts. have happily purchased something that’s too good to be true.
Since they goal is making arrests for their own sake, they have little incentive to get things right.
My homeboy, Barry Cooper, former LEO and Pro-Cannabis activist has <a href=”http://nevergetbusted.com/v2/k9test3.php”railed against the use of dogs for narcotic detection. The dogs can be so easily manipulated by the handlers. The manipulation generates probable cause. A manual search is conducted and drugs appear. Drug dogs are voodoo, tantamount to using a divining rod to find a well.
it’s time to load up the super-soaker with ‘pot soup’ and visit these fuckers with the dogs… maybe the mayor’ll get an extra coupla squirts on his car… I’m gonna hose down every city vehicle I see!
stay tuned..
Edintally- you get bonus points for properly using ‘Bogarting’ in a sentence… about made me snort Dr. Pepper outta my nose!
Oops, I need a preview button! Here’s that link to Barry Coopers K9 false alert page.
#17 - That’s what I thought… if they did smell it would have made that old episode of Barney Miller less believable.
Marty-my bad
“They did have a pungent, rancid odor,” Lt. Cain said. “They did have the odor of marijuana. I got within two feet of it; I could smell it.”
That would be your upper lip there, LT.
What a bag of jerks.
chalk (also known as sheet rock)
Is that some weird drug slang? The powdery material inside drywall board is gypsum, not chalk.
“#4
I can neither confirm nor deny that I have ever been in the presence of a baked good with marijuana baked into it!”
I can completely and authoritatively confirm it in my own case.
“But the answer is: NO”
That is entirely correct.
As David (#19) pointed out, cracking skulls and locking up bodies is their job. When you have subjects, rather than customers, there’s very little incentive to err on the side of civility. All of the other details are just side-effects of this lack of negative feedback.
Simon (this is a bit off topic, goes to cracking skull)
I was watching a British “Cops” show last night. Officers came up to a belligerent guy on the street and started TALKING to him. Clock keeps ticking and I’m waiting for the officers to administer the inevitable beat down……….nothing. They just calmly walk him over to the police car, put him in un-cuffed, and hold him until he calms down. Crazy!
#13
I’ve seen a field test used on COPS, kinda like from CSI. The officer took a vial with some chemical in it, added the substance in question (can’t remember which), and waited for the color change. Kind of like those pH test strips we used back in high school chem.
As far as the smell goes, dried sage smells extremely close to marijuana when it’s burned. So I guess that could possibly explain the odor reported by the officers. Now…why someone would put sage in chocolate chip cookies is beyond me…
Since field tests are used during the “probable cause” part of the process, not the “reasonable doubt” part, they could have a pretty high false positive rate and still be acceptable. Or the false positive rate might be pretty low; you can’t tell from anecdotes, you need numbers. Unfortunately, any published numbers probably assume lab-perfect conditions, not real cops with real kits and real biases.
Since field tests are used during the “probable cause” part of the process, not the “reasonable doubt” part, they could have a pretty high false positive rate and still be acceptable.
Perhaps, but if one performs twenty searches based on “probable cause” and only five turn up something, just how “probable” was the “cause”? While the Constitution doesn’t give an exact mathematical definition for “probable cause”, ordinary English usage would take it to mean “more likely than not”. That would suggest a probability over 50%, though that doesn’t necessarily mean over a 50% success rate. Going zero for three would not imply that one didn’t have a better-than-50% probability on each try; even with a 53% chance of success on each try, one would go zero for three about 1/10 of the time.
Even though an officer who goes zero for three might simply be having bad luck despite having probable cause, there’s a limit to how far out that works. If an officer makes 100 searches, each with a 50% chance of success, he should get at least 38 successful searches 99% of the time. If he doesn’t manage 38 successes, he very likely didn’t have probable cause. If he doesn’t manage at least 26, he almost certainly didn’t have probable cause (failing to get at least 26 heads out of 100 flips of a balanced coin would be a one-in-a-million shot).
I was talking about whether the test can establish probable cause. Are you talking about whether the results indicate they had probable cause to perform the test? That math is a lot more complicated. You have to look at the probability of the the stuff being drugs, and the probabilities of both false-positive and false-negative results. You also have to look at the accuracy of the more thorough lab tests which people treat as the “real” result even though they can’t possibly be perfect.
Besides, in a case like this, the police don’t need probable cause or reasonable suspicion or even a hunch to perform the test. The cookies were given to them.
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