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July 8, 2016 9:44 AM   Subscribe

Police, Prosecutors, and Judges Rely on a Flawed $2 Drug Test That Puts Innocent People Behind Bars

Tens of thousands of people every year are sent to jail based on the results of a $2 roadside drug test. Widespread evidence shows that these tests routinely produce false positives. Why are police departments and prosecutors still using them?
posted by poffin boffin (33 comments total) 27 users marked this as a favorite
 
Why are police departments and prosecutors still using them?

Because they're cheap and produce positives.
posted by the man of twists and turns at 9:48 AM on July 8, 2016 [68 favorites]


Fills the privatized cells, boosts everyone's numbers at the end of the month, other profitable things, and institutionalized extermination.
posted by infini at 9:50 AM on July 8, 2016 [2 favorites]


Sorry, but what a day to see this little thing, when in fact the rest of what's going on outside is far more horrendous. This is just the radius of the border drawn around the nightmare.
posted by infini at 9:51 AM on July 8, 2016 [7 favorites]


Remember how Mother Jones exposed how municipalities have to pay the prisons if they don't have enough inmates? A whole mess of $2 tests that produce false positives are way cheaper.
posted by SansPoint at 9:57 AM on July 8, 2016 [11 favorites]


Anyone surprised? While I'm sure they are all very, very good dogs, sniffer dogs aren't particularly accurate, either, yet their alerts are still used to justify searches.
posted by praemunire at 9:59 AM on July 8, 2016 [13 favorites]


Because they're cheap and produce positives.

frankly I'm not sure "cheap" is in the plus column for police forces. Big expenditures = big budgets
posted by Hoopo at 10:00 AM on July 8, 2016 [1 favorite]


Hoopo: frankly I'm not sure "cheap" is in the plus column for police forces. Big expenditures = big budgets

A pricier, more accurate test means less drug convictions, which means paying penalties on the prison contracts.
posted by SansPoint at 10:01 AM on July 8, 2016 [3 favorites]


Albritton told Richardson that the police were mistaken; she was innocent. But Richardson, she says, was unswayed. The police had found crack in her car. The test proved it.

I'm not so much upset by the fact that there might be a $2 test in use that produces false positives; I'm willing to believe such a test might have a place, perhaps even in the criminal justice system.

I am upset that the criminal justice system apparently admits people to its ranks who do not understand the difference between "the test came back positive" and "the test proved it."

It's a human problem to not understand the limits of our tools and knowledge, but we should demand more of a system that claims to be about justice.
posted by wildblueyonder at 10:03 AM on July 8, 2016 [26 favorites]


There is probably a representation problem here too. A funded defendant could probably call the results into question, but I'll bet most (or all) of these do not have means.
posted by Bovine Love at 10:07 AM on July 8, 2016 [6 favorites]


I have a relative in the system. there is no part of it that is not a racket - end to end.

- visitation (video only, for-profit tech and service)
- phone (collect calls, for-profit tech and service)
- public defender (apparently there is one, who my relative will meet with to discuss his case in detail approximately 1.5 minutes before his hearing begins)
- parole office (incredible catch-22 bureaucracy designed to undo parole and get more beds filled. e.g. gotta have a job - but also have to be at two meetings during the day, every day, at different times, to be scheduled the day before. must also be back at halfway-house before 8pm, so no night jobs.)
- utterly shit food (but there is an Aramark store on premises to buy inflated-price oatmeal and vitamins)
- family can send books. but only brand new books sent directly from web stores to the prison.

don't talk to the police.
posted by j_curiouser at 10:16 AM on July 8, 2016 [62 favorites]


Never, ever, ever give police consent to search your vehicle (or person, or home). Even if they say they'll bring the drug dogs. It's possible that the delay in waiting for the dogs could be challenged as an illegal seizure, so it's always worth it to not make it easy for the cops.

I'm shocked that Albritton's public defender did not demand a chemist's report from the State as part of discovery. I don't know the law in Texas, but in my state, when requested by defense counsel, the State must provide a copy of the State chemist's report in CDS cases.
posted by enjoymoreradio at 10:27 AM on July 8, 2016 [5 favorites]


This is awful especially given the fact that lots of the drug testers don't even want to do their jobs
posted by Faith Connors at 10:40 AM on July 8, 2016 [1 favorite]


Never, ever, ever give police consent to search your vehicle (or person, or home). Even if they say they'll bring the drug dogs.

...but also be aware that refusing consent might mean they tase you, or beat the shit out of you, or kill you. Or some combination.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 10:46 AM on July 8, 2016 [35 favorites]


The amount of money we, as a nation, spend on the "justice" system is astounding. We really need a term for this industry analogous to the "military-industrial complex" so famously used by Eisenhower. The "prison-industrial complex" has been used to include public and private prisons, etc. This one aspect of the complex costs $150-200 billion a year. The costs of pre-incarceration stages such as police and other enforcement costs, the costs of the courts, of lawyers, both defense and prosecuting, and of post-conviction supervision (parole, probation, etc.) may be of equal or greater amounts. This data is difficult to ferret out. It is commonly stated that health care accounts for some 16-18% of the GDP. I have little doubt that the justice system as a whole - or perhaps we can paraphrase Michael Foucault and call it the surveillance-punishment industrial complex - accounts for similar if not more in amount. This leaves aside lost productivity of people caught in the system.

Yet, this complex does not deliver justice, except incidentally. What is does deliver is dependable profits. You are the raw material, both as taxpayer and potential victim.

Accuracy is not a virtue. Blatant error and incompetence, whether in some quick field test, so-called "lie detectors," eyewitness testimony, the behavior of state and federal crime labs, or criminal procedure, is a feature, not a bug. Inaccuracy feeds the system. Meat moving down the conveyor belt generates the profits.

Come on, citizens, get with the program.
posted by sudogeek at 11:08 AM on July 8, 2016 [2 favorites]


There was a time when cops wouldn't arrest for a literal crumb of alleged drugs. They'd file that suspicion away in their mind and figure they'd catch you later, when there was enough of the substance to be reasonably certain you had illegal drugs. I can't count the number of times when I was growing up that friends of mine were subject to such a catch and release policy. It helped that nobody gave much of a shit about simple possession.

That was before the militarization of policing turned it into an all out war on the poor and minorities, though. Before private prisons, before daily or weekly reports of crime statistics, before we went fucking crazy as a nation.
posted by wierdo at 11:08 AM on July 8, 2016 [5 favorites]


It seems everyone is aware of everything, yet inertia allows this system to persist and destroy lives.
posted by infini at 11:10 AM on July 8, 2016 [7 favorites]


>Remember how Mother Jones exposed how municipalities have to pay the prisons if they don't have enough inmates? ...

The sheer immorality of a contract like that is appalling.
posted by Catblack at 11:12 AM on July 8, 2016 [5 favorites]


It persists, because people make good money from it. The privately owned prisons make money. The manufacturers of heavy arms make money. The police unions make money. The companies that use prisoners as cheap labor make money. The politicians who get lobbied on behalf of all these industries make money.

The only thing that matters to people is that they make money.
Meanwhile the DEA
Teamed up with the CCA
They tryna lock niggas up
They tryna make new slaves
See thats that privately owned prison
Get your piece today
posted by SansPoint at 11:14 AM on July 8, 2016 [5 favorites]


"That was before the militarization of policing turned it into an all out war on the poor and minorities, though"

It wasn't militarization that did this nor is this just a war on minorities and the poor. Civil forfeiture has been used for decades now to "legally" steal money and items from people without charging the people with any crime.

And now they can even seize your bank accounts.

Here's a Washington Post investigation from 2014.
posted by I-baLL at 11:17 AM on July 8, 2016 [2 favorites]


So they spot drugs but the results are Fake? What could we name this product?
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 11:22 AM on July 8, 2016


The only thing that matters to people is that they make money.

But Lincoln managed to overturn that somehow.
posted by infini at 11:37 AM on July 8, 2016


The political system as presently constituted isn't equipped to solve this problem, but it occurs to me that once Presidents leave office, they tend to be seen in a more sympathetic light, and can make for effective agents of change for whatever causes they decide to commit to. Obama's going to be extremely young for an ex-President when he boards Marine One for the last time, and once his golf game is dialed in, it seems like the carceral state would be a great thing for him to focus on.

He's unlikely to move the needle at the federal level for the same reasons he's been stymied as President, and that will limit what he can do on this issue given the existence of mandatory minimums, but I'm imagining him traveling around the country to states with Democratic or not-crazy-Republican governors pushing for decriminalization and relaxing of municipal and state drug charges. As a person of color who dabbled in drug use himself and managed to go on to a pretty productive career, I can't think of a better spokesperson for the issue.
posted by tonycpsu at 11:37 AM on July 8, 2016 [12 favorites]


The mandatory minimums have to change! And that gets done by, uh, Congress. Woo hoo!

Think about serving a year in prison. Or even five years. Half of your twenties, down the toilet. That's a serious sanction! But the US Code is handing out mandatory sentences of 20 years and more all over the place, for non-violent crimes. This system is wrong in so many ways. It vitiates the rule of law by undermining the people's belief in the justice of the law. It serves to coerce innocent persons into pleading guilty for fear of draconian sentences. It destroys lives and families of people who, at most, should have done a year or two for selling drugs. As a deterrent instrument in the War On Drugs, it has failed.
posted by thelonius at 11:46 AM on July 8, 2016 [10 favorites]


There was a time when cops wouldn't arrest for a literal crumb of alleged drugs.

How long ago was that? Because as a youth I got arrested for literally an empty sandwich bag that had formerly contained drugs several hours before but no longer did at time of arrest.

The base immorality of the prison-industrial complex is like the one thing that me and my libertarian dad agree on. It's absolutely shameful and disgusting and it's dismaying how few people actually know about it.
posted by soren_lorensen at 12:02 PM on July 8, 2016 [3 favorites]


Now that's some fucking journalism.
posted by Rainbo Vagrant at 12:10 PM on July 8, 2016 [7 favorites]


It seems everyone is aware of everything, yet inertia allows this system to persist and destroy lives.

This reminds me of an RAW theme: if nobody wants wars, how come we keep on having 'em?

(protip: somebody wants them)
posted by j_curiouser at 12:44 PM on July 8, 2016 [3 favorites]


Never, ever, ever give police consent to search your vehicle (or person, or home) if you're white.

FTFY
posted by Hairy Lobster at 12:59 PM on July 8, 2016 [3 favorites]


I've said this elsewhere, but this is a holocaust of black and brown people in slow motion, and the "justice system" is just a fig leaf, a flimsy facade, so we can all pretend it's not happening. Why are police departments and prosecutors still using flawed drug tests? Come the fuck on.
posted by AFABulous at 1:38 PM on July 8, 2016 [2 favorites]


Yeah, the problem with focusing on not consenting to searches is that in the vast majority of cases, it doesn't matter. They will search anyway, if in no other way than by bringing out the drug dog. Never mind that the supreme court and many state courts have declared it unconstitutional to make you wait for the dog, they do anyway.

And even if you don't consent and can afford a well recommended lawyer, you get fucked by the police report being..massaged..to make it all seem legal. They may have "smelled marijuana" or have seen something that raised their suspicion, like maybe a bottle of legally prescribed medication. Even though it can't used as PC if they know it is legal because you tell them so, they will omit that from their report. Lots of cruisers have dash cams these days, but very few record audio.
posted by wierdo at 1:40 PM on July 8, 2016 [1 favorite]



There was a time when cops wouldn't arrest for a literal crumb of alleged drugs.

How long ago was that? Because as a youth I got arrested for literally an empty sandwich bag that had formerly contained drugs several hours before but no longer did at time of arrest.




It has been a while. But there was a time.

1950. Newark, N.J.

Three of us (11,12 &12) passing a joint around.

The beat cop comes around the corner.

Knows one kid and learns our names. Next day my dad beats me with his belt.

Today there is no telling how my future would have been screwed up because of the war on drugs. Thanks Nancy and Anita.

Also. The 11 year old was black and treated equally.
posted by notreally at 2:36 PM on July 8, 2016 [5 favorites]


Per Hairy Lobster, here's what happened to one black man in Denver who asserted his constitutional rights in 2009.
posted by elmay at 2:40 PM on July 8, 2016 [5 favorites]


The dollar store pregnancy tests are just as good as the more expensive high-end pharmacy versions, as regulated by the FDA. The larger situation is terrible, but the cost of the test itself shouldn't be the issue.
posted by fragmede at 9:22 PM on July 8, 2016


The hidden engine behind the state's well-oiled prison machine is cold, hard cash. A majority of Louisiana inmates are housed in for-profit facilities, which must be supplied with a constant influx of human beings or a $182 million industry will go bankrupt.
posted by infini at 10:22 AM on July 11, 2016


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