Considering the stereotypical relationship between cops and doughnuts, you’d think that the average officer would be able to easily identify the glaze of a doughnut for the confection it so clearly is. Sadly, that doesn’t necessarily seem to be the case.
At least not for one retired Orlando, Florida man, who was actually arrested and charged with possession of methamphetamines over a few discarded flakes of doughnut frosting.
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Sixty-four-year-old Daniel Rushing has a longstanding tradition of treating himself to a Krispy Kreme doughnut every other Wednesday. Little did he know that the simple indulgence would eventually lead to an attempted drug bust.
Back in December, after Rushing dropped off a friend for a chemotherapy session, he went out of his way to pick up another friend who works at the local 7-Eleven to give her a ride home. That’s when he was pulled over by police officers who were staking out the convenience store following complaints of drug-related activity. Rushing was asked to exit his car and veteran officer Cpl. Shelby Riggs-Hopkins, who then claims to have spotted “a rock like substance on the floor board where his feet were.”
Rushing said, “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.’”
According to Rushing’s arrest report, two roadside drug tests came back positive as an illegal substance. Rushing was then handcuffed, arrested, strip-searched at a county jail, booked on a charge of possession of methamphetamine with a firearm (he had a concealed weapon permit), and incarcerated for about ten hours. Finally, he was released on a $2,500 bond.
It wasn’t until several weeks later that the results came back from a state crime lab, which cleared him.
Rushing is now planning to sue the City of Orlando. He said, “I got arrested for no reason at all.”
Why would two roadside drug tests come back with false positives? The Orlando Sentinel asked the police department how often that happens, and a spokeswoman told them, “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.”
Meanwhile, The New York Times recently reported that false positives on roadside drug tests are a pretty damn big problem. The review found that the Florida Department of Law Enforcement Lab misidentified substances as methamphetamine a whopping 21 percent of the time. Half of those times, the substance turned out not to be a drug at all.
If that doesn’t put you off eating Krispy Kreme in your car, we don’t know what else will.
