Faulty Field Tests And Overblown Drug Raid Claims: The War On Drugs In Clay County, Florida
from the serving-and-press-conferencing dept
Yet another Florida sheriff with a penchant for publicity is using his office (and manpower) to start some garbage viral War on Drugs. Hence, every bust made by his department -- utilizing armored vehicles and deputies that look like they shop at military surplus stores -- is splashed across the department's Facebook page. Fine, if that's what gets your blood flowing, but these scenes of busts, featuring the Sheriff front and center, contain claims that just aren't backed up by the actual paperwork. George Joseph of The Appeal has the details.
The video finds Sheriff [Darryl] Daniels, who announces to the viewer that criminals must leave his county or face the consequences. The camera follows him to the house, briefly focusing on a broken window before Daniels opens the door. Standing in the raided home, Daniels takes a large swig of his morning cup of coffee and declares, “Fifteen going to jail, three big gulps.”
Despite the sheriff’s announcement, the “raid” resulted in only five adult arrests and one juvenile arrest, according to Elaine Brown, a lead records specialist at the sheriff’s office.
At best, maybe five will be going to jail. The sheriff depicts this as a raid on a "narcotics house" targeting opioids. The records obtained by The Appeal show no opioids were found during the raid. Four of the five adults were arrested for marijuana possession. The fifth was charged with MDMA and cocaine possession. But chances are those drugs might vanish along with the nonexistent opioids Sheriff Daniels proudly proclaims were taken out of circulation.
Note the line about the field drug tests performed. These have already been proven bogus. A sheriff's office spokesman informed The Appeal that the 1.2 grams of heroin and fentanyl seized during the raid turned out not be opioids after being lab-tested. But the field tests told Sheriff Daniels everything he wanted to hear.
The reliance on cheap, terrible drug field tests is part of Sheriff Daniels' drug-raiding tradition. Arrests and seizures sound great when you're dragging a camera through someone's house for a Facebook video, but when nothing holds up in court, you're left with an empty charade using citizens as clickbait.
A former deputy contacted by The Appeal points out that cheap drug tests are just another tool for abusive police work.
“The really good ones cost money, but those take away your probable cause,” he said, referring to arrests and police searches for which error-prone drug test field kits can provide legal pretext. “It’s probably the cheapest ones they could get to do the minimum standards for an investigation.”
This same former deputy also pointed out the marijuana charges were trumped up. According to reports, 35 grams of marijuana were seized during the raid, but somehow two people are being charged with possession of more than 20 grams.
Cheap tests, cheap vicarious thrills, and a whole lot of hype over drug charges that will likely dissipate into minimal punishment (if anything) once the lab tests arrive. That's how America's drug warriors roll. Sheriff Daniels rolls a little harder than most, but that's because tough-on-crime sheriffs are newscaster favorites. As The Appeal points out, Daniels has leveraged these videos to appear on national news networks and say ridiculous things like he's planning to treat all drug overdoses as homicides.
This report points out some very unpleasant things about our war on drugs. Law enforcement officials may claim to recognize drug addiction as a sickness, but they're still far more interested in rounding up users than dealers. Faulty field drug tests allow officials to exaggerate their successes (and misrepresent the amount of dangerous drugs in the community), when not allowing them to perform searches they otherwise wouldn't have probable cause to perform. They're part permission slip, part unpaid PR rep. And this constant failure of field drug tests to accurately identify drugs gets ignored but local media, for the most part, isn't willing to follow up on high-profile drug raids to correct the record. And it keeps working because many Americans love the image of "tough on drugs" officers kicking in doors and waving guns around. But, far too often, "tough" just means dumb, brutish, and unconstitutional.
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Filed Under: darryl daniels, drug tests, field tests, florida, war on drugs
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What exactly is ridiculous about that? You think the drug dealers didn't know they were selling stuff that can kill people? Seems to me the Felony Murder Rule clearly applies here. (Does Florida have that? I know it varies state-by-state.)
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Yeah I can get behind that.
Considering tobacco not only has high death tolls but is statistically the actual gateway drug to harder stuff (legal or otherwise), this may be the means to finally kill the big tobacco empire.
Or we can still use drug infractions to keep stuffing our for-profit prisons with warm bodies.
Yes, I'm bitter. Why do you ask?
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Re: Yeah I can get behind that.
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Re: Re: Yeah I can get behind that.
I was being facetious, though granted that may not have been fully clear.
My current opinion is we should do what Portugal has done most recently (and appears to be working) which is to decriminalize usage of all controlled substances and treat addiction as a illness.
No, the whole War On Drugs is a scam to perpetuate a yearly multi-billion-dollar budget and harassing marginalized sectors of society.
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Re: Yeah I can get behind that.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torches_of_Freedom
I want my smoking reparations!
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Umm... do you even know what the Felony Murder Rule is? Because nothing you just wrote would actually apply, but dealing illegal drugs would.
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Every car dealer does that, and in contrast to drugs, a lot more people die from cars they were not involved with.
Homicide is knowingly selling cars with faulty brakes or drugs laced with poison.
But selling stuff that is inherently dangerous rather than deliberately (and surprisingly) dangerous is not homicide.
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You think the drug dealers didn't know they were selling stuff that can kill people?
I'd be happy to apply this policy to drug dealers as soon as we also apply it to guns. Deal?
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unpleasant things
the biggest thing is that there is absolutely NO Constitutional/legal authority to criminalize the use of any drugs/chemicals.
The government fig-leaf for conducting the massive War on Drugs is that the Constitution "Commerce Clause" somehow grants the government full authority to dictate what peaceful Americans may inhale/inject/ingest to their bodies.
It is a bizarre legal posture.
Note that 1918 US alcohol Prohibition movement fully recognized that American government had no legal authority whatsoever to prohibit alcohol. A formal Constitutional amendment was required for that (Prohibition was a national disaster and the Amendment was repealed).
Now our government just does whatever it wants, without concern for that pesky constitutional stuff.
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Re: unpleasant things
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Re: Re: unpleasant things
FEDERAL DEA is huge and extremely active -- arresting tons of people
FEDS eagerly jump into any state that may slack off on the sacred Drug War crusade
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Re: Re: Re: unpleasant things
But people have gotten so used to the CSA being around, they've forgotten that the US Constitution makes it VERY clear that commerce clause or not, the feds lack prohibitory authority over intoxicants.
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Facebook
Anyone consider buying a few of those bottom end field test kits and putting out some videos of how they test positive for cocaine on sugar, ANY dried leaf is marijuana, etc? You could go through the kitchen testing stuff to point out just how ridiculous it is to rely on them for Probable Cause. They'd probably pop positive for just about any meat items as well.
Get THAT circulating on facebook and the news will pick it up here and there. As will defense attorneys once it gets well known.
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Re: Facebook
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False positive = probable cause
This seems to be a norm now, hence dogs that false-positive 80% of the time are being kept in place of sniffing technology that detects smaller traces and is more accurate. They want to keep the free bypass of Fourth Amendment protections.
But this is bringing to question all forensic detection systems and the legitimacy of the court system itself. The US legal system is demonstrating it cannot adjudicate but only abducts warm bodies to fill prisons.
It's very likely there are more innocent incarcerated in the US than people actually guilty of the crimes they were convicted. (We're all guilty of crap but not stuff that should warrant prison time, or really be against the law at all.)
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Re: False positive = probable cause
I think there's a name for that; it's called "slavery".
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Re: Re: False positive = probable cause
This is worse than slavery even, because the beatings, whippings, etc are all still there,but without fresh air or sunlight.
And provably fewer books to read.
Modern peonage, Slavery by Another Name
http://www.pbs.org/tpt/slavery-by-another-name/home/
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They knowingly are purchasing tests KNOWN to give false positives so they can invent probable cause.
They are wasting taxpayer money, on shitty tests, so they can trump up charges against them.
Someone let me know at what point the local DA should be trying very hard to cover his ass for allowing violations of peoples civil rights to move forward for a Chief to LIE to the public about crime?
It's one of those silly things no one wants to think about until your loose leaf tea gets your house raided for a photo op, destroying your reputation & forcing you to pay to defend against bogus charges... only to have a court give them good faith to dodge responsibility for having manufactured evidence.
These are bad people so the methods don't matter... at some point someone is gonna think you are a bad person.
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If they can benefit from the good faith doctrine, so can anyone, or the doctrine is challengable on constitutional grounds.
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So basically he's decided that he owns the entire area and can do whatever he wants in pursuit of his goal. 'Drunk with power' comes to mind, along with 'stay far, far away from that lunatic if at all possible'.
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I'd say he is giving cops a bad name, but as far as I know his deputies aren't tapping on the window then shooting people they pulled over.... yet.
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Using their office
They ignore the violations of the Clinton Foundation this thing reeks of politics
But speaking of the drug war, People in Honduras have to flee their country because the Drug Gangs, don't you democrats think you should stop buying Marijuana, you're making the drug gangs rich
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Re: Using their office
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https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Ewell-135
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