Imagine being a 65-year-old retiree getting pulled over for speeding. People get pulled over for speeding everyday, so that’s not totally out of the ordinary. What is out of the ordinary is that when you pull out your wallet, the cop suddenly asks you get out of the car for the safety of the officer. You see, inside your wallet is a concealed carry permit – and as we all know, all criminals legally registered their weapons before committing a crime.
As you step outside the vehicle, the officer notices a a rock-like substance on the floor. The officer gets suspicious, and you let him know that you were indulging in the ritualistic consumption of a Krispy Kreme donuts earlier – that little pebble is just the residue of the sugary goodness.
The officer doesn’t buy it. No, the officer believer that not only are you lying about what the pebble is, but that it is in point of fact amphetamines. The officer then pulls out a testing kit, and states that it indicates that the donuts dust is crystal meth.
The officer then decides to arrest you for possessing meth “with a weapon” (your legally carried handgun), which made your third-degree felony, punishable by up to five years in prison, into a second-degree felony, punishable by up to 15 years in prison.
This story isn’t the work of the imagination of a crazed anti-cop journalist, but is actually the story of Daniel Rushing.
As reported by the Orlando Sentinel, Daniel Rushing was handcuffed and taken to the county jail, where he was strip-searched and locked up for 10 hours before being released on $2,500 bail. Three days later, after a lab test found no illegal substance in the evidence recovered by Riggs-Hopkins, the charges against Rushing were dropped. The lab test was not specific enough to identify which brand of donut the glaze came from, so we’ll just have to take Rushing’s word that it was indeed a Krispy Kreme.
Rushing told the Sentinel he had tried to start a security business but could not find work because “people go online and see that you’ve been arrested.” The Orlando Police Department (OPD) initially defended the arrest. But according to the Sentinel, the OPD “ended up training more than 730 officers on how to properly use the field test kits,” and “Riggs-Hopkins was given a written reprimand for making an improper arrest.”
The city of Orlando ended up giving Rushing $37,500 to settle a law suit against them.
In addition to the city of Orlando, Rushing sued the Safariland Group, which made the test kit used by the officer. Although the OPD evidently attributes the two false positives that preceded Rushing’s arrest to the officer’s inept performance of the drug test, such field kits are notoriously unreliable and may react to a wide range of legal substances. Faulty field tests were at the center of a 2012 Kansas marijuana raid triggered by loose tea, a case that last summer resulted in a rebuke by a federal appeals court panel. One of the judges faulted “junk science” as well as “an incompetent investigation” and a thirst for publicity.
