” I’m not sure that the individual officers involved in the raid ought to know.”

The only ones whose knowledge is relevant is the ones who applied for the warrant and or provided the affidavit as to its result.

“The field tests were apparently done by deputies who were not the people who made the decision to apply for the warrant”

If they attested to the results of the field test without having done it themselves or waiting for the lab tests they should be charged with perjury.

The field test kits in question demonstrably yields false positives on so many common substances that Sheriff Denning’s testimony is not credible.

Please tell my you are joking when you say “see, it could happen.”

Are we really to believe that in the thousands of field tests, only these two every produced a false positive? Are we really believe that the police were unaware of the false positive issue from this particular company?

There is also this conundrum:

Firs from Kerr’s post: Based on the officer’s “law enforcement training and experience,” it appeared as though it had been saturated through a liquid to extract THC, the active ingredient in marijuana. The officer field tested the plant material, and it tested positive for THC.

Secondly from Radko’s post: It took all of 10 days to complete those lab tests. The lab not only concluded that substance wasn’t pot, the analysts added, “It does not look anything like marijuana leaves or stems.”

Which are we to believe? That the officers were trained and had experience marijuana which allowed the results of the tests to be the basis of the warrant? Or were the officers so lacking in training and experience that they couldn’t even identify what was marijuana which would have precluded the need for any test to be conducted?

It seems to me that the lack of training and experience in identifying marijuana led the officers to get a false positive. It just flies in the face of reason that officers who don’t even know what marijuana looks like can somehow have their “training and experience” relied upon.

See, it could happen.

The police should as a body in the long run become aware of the problems, but in this case, no, I’m not sure that the individual officers involved in the raid ought to know. The field tests were apparently done by deputies who were not the people who made the decision to apply for the warrant, and the raid was carried out by a SWAT team, whose members were not involved in the investigation.

Do you actually believe that individual police officers are not informed of the forensic lab results on evidence they bring in pursuant to an investigation? That seems exceedingly unlikely. Which means that it is exceedingly unlikely that any officer that has used a field drug test kit more than a tiny number of times is unaware of the likelihood of false positives.

It should be perjury to even describe this as a “drug test” to a judge in a warrant application. You may as well just do a pH test.