Lawsuit: Cops mistook doughnut glaze for meth

A Florida man is suing the police after being arrested when a pair of Orlando police officers decided the tiny flakes of glaze that had fallen off his doughnut and into his floorboard were pieces of crystal meth.

The Orlando Sentinel reported:

Daniel Rushing treats himself to a Krispy Kreme doughnut every other Wednesday. He used to eat them in his car.

Not anymore.

Not since a pair of Orlando police officers pulled him over, spotted four tiny flakes of glaze on his floorboard and arrested him, saying they were pieces of crystal methamphetamine.

The officers did two roadside drug tests and both came back positive for the illegal substance, according to his arrest report.

He was handcuffed, arrested, taken to the county jail and strip searched, he said.

A state crime lab, however, did another test several weeks later and cleared him.

“It was incredible,” he said. “It feels scary when you haven’t done anything wrong and get arrested. … It’s just a terrible feeling.”

Rushing, a concealed carry permit holder, was asked to step out of his car and the police conducted a search because one officer said she spotted “a rock like substance on the floor board where his feet were.”

“I recognized through my eleven years of training and experience as a law enforcement officer the substance to be some sort of narcotic,” she wrote.

Unfortunately, neither 11 years of law enforcement training nor a government approved roadside drug test were enough to distinguish doughnut glaze from crystal meth.

The 64-year-old was locked up for 10 hours for possession of methamphetamine before finally being released on a $2,500 bond.

Unfortunately, Rushing’s case isn’t an anomaly. As ProPublica recently reported, thousands of Americans find themselves behind bars each year based on little more than officer suspicion of drugs present and field tests which have proven time and again ineffective.

The post Lawsuit: Cops mistook doughnut glaze for meth appeared first on Personal Liberty®.

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