Daniel Rushing probably won’t be eating Krispy Kreme doughnuts in his car any more.
The 64-year-old was arrested on drug charges when Orlando police officers spotted four tiny flakes of glaze on his floorboard and thought they were pieces of crystal methamphetamine, The Orlando Sentinel reports.
[TL;DR: Suspect had been eating Krisy Kreme donuts in his car]
“I recognized through my eleven years of training and experience as a law enforcement officer the substance to be some sort of narcotic,”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news...e-doughnuts-for-crystal-meth?CMP=share_btn_tw
Following a train of thought from a months-old post which I hadn't seen before, may I interrupt you good peoples' leisure with what (to me) is quite an entertaining account of similar police stupidity?
Firstly, I'd like to point out that I'm not one of those people who is rabidly 'anti-police' (although many officers that I've encountered socially have seemed to be absolute cast-iron-copper-bottomed-you-know-whats). I believe the British constabularies are a bit more discriminating in their recruiting practices these days. Nor am I condoning the smoking of cannabis, which I haven't touched for years, partly as I'm sure it is very, very bad for the human lung.
To set the scene (the boring bit - actually, it may all be boring):
Myself and a couple of friends were walking back from a pub and arrived at a part of town where we had to peel off in three divergent directions to get to our respective homes. Unwilling to cut short a highly intellectual conversation on politics, education and nutrition (or rambling old bollocks, possibly) we rested ourselves on a bench for a few minutes in a quiet place near my house where we wouldn't be disturbing anyone - our big mistake, as it turned out. Admittedly we did spend some of the time enjoying a 'jazz cigarette' offered by one of my pals, which is relevant to the story, as even at the time such a minor transgression was hardly an arrestable offence but would attract the attention of any proximate plod, earning you a ticking off and a lecture on the dangers of drugs. A few minutes later, as we were preparing to go our seperate ways we were approached by highly-strung youngish men with torches, who we quickly recognised as police officers. As such they must have cunningly detected the scent of hashish on our clothes, and in the general area.
One of them scoured the ground beneath the bench, obviously looking for 'the drugs' - which my mate had inconspicuously dropped somewhere it wouldn't be found without daylight, to no effect - after a brief conflab the officer in charge suddenly informed us we were being detained on suspicion of Criminal Damage!
Here's where it gets farcical:
On arriving at the station it became clear what was going on: they initially claimed to have been sent to check out some vandalism to a nearby gate (not generally the work of well-meaning law-abiding blokes in their twenties). The gate, by the way, wasn't damaged, and had it been I might have contacted the Rozzers myself, as it was the main entrance to my place. I suspect they were just poking around various locations out of boredom (literally 'looking for trouble') and were delighted to get an exciting sniff of 'drug crime', but hadn't found any narcotics, hence the ludicrous 'criminal damage' charge - which they completely forgot about having concocted after roughly three minutes, having reverted to the more exciting 'dangerous drug maniacs' strategy in the hope of getting at least one arrest. In fact, the younger more reasonable chap was later to admit that it had been 'a quiet night' and they just didn't have much to do.
At the station we were split up and interviewed, and my joint-wielding friend (a teetotal vegan) apparently annoyed them further when asked 'have you taken any drugs tonight?' by replying, 'what, you mean like alcohol, nicotine or caffeine?'. They didn't like this at all, and returned to me to ask, 'is your mate always such an arsehole?'.
By this time they were getting really annoyed and were
desperate to charge someone with something - and so my friend was searched and again they visited me, this time to gloat about how they'd found suspicious 'plant material' in his pocket. This they showed to me: it was some sort of flat beans in Tesco packaging marked er, 'Flat Beans'. "It's some sort of bean" I deduced, by this point unable to keep a straight face, "from Tesco". "
We know it's drugs", barked the copper, "we're taking it to our lab to be analysed now!". His colleague then opined that the illicit substances had been placed in supermarket packaging to disguise them
My other friend had told them more or less the same thing: "They're obviously just beans...he's a vegan...he's always buying that kind of stuff. For salads and things."
Now, despite not being experienced criminal masterminds, even we knew that there was no hi-tech 'drugs lab' at that provincial cop shop - and certainly not one that was fully staffed at nearly midnight on a weekday and could deliver instant results. Therefore hilarity ensued when matey returned after ten minutes or so claiming "We've got the tests back from the lab and
we know it's drugs, but your mate's not admitting anything. It'll be easier for him if you just own up". Naturally I enquired what sort of 'drugs' they thought they'd found. They didn't know of course - and amazingly seemed totally unprepared for such a question - and being utterly lost for words had eventually to let us go, quite ungraciously, and with evidently damaged egos. Much relieved to have regained our liberty we laughed all the way home.
So there you have it: my career as a menace to society! I'm not trying to defame today's UK police en masse, only relating the story here as I still can't believe how mind-bogglingly thick these boys in blue were - and yet how they clearly believed themselves, even whilst painting themselves into a corner and having lied and lied again, to be cleverly outwitting us, innocent, guilty or whatever.
Edited for typos