The Germs' Drummer Arrested For Carrying Soap 384
dwrugh writes "The drummer for the seminal punk band The Germs, Don Bolles, was arrested in Orange County because a field-test kit indicated his bottle of Dr. Bronner's soap contained GHB, the date-rape drug. (Here is an interview with Bolles.) Using the same test kit, available on the web for $20 for a pack of 10, according to Bolles' attorney on NBC this morning, other soaps tested positive for GHB. But of course since it's just soap, when you test it in a real crime lab it comes back negative. Makes you wonder what other common household products also test positive, and how many others have been arrested based on faulty test kits who didn't have the resources to defend themselves."
Lexicon Devil (Score:5, Interesting)
On a tangent only marginally related to the topic
The Germs were the REAL DEAL, the lead singer would spread peanut butter on his naked chest while cutting himself with a broken bottle on stage. They didn't just looked the part, they sounded the part too, with some of the rawest late-70's-hardcore-punk around.
Now to the topic at hand - so what. Not every test is 100% reliable. False positives exist. This is a headline story for what reason exactly?
And for the obligitary Slashdot tongue-in-cheek comment: I don't see how having GHB in soap is helping anyone. If you've already convinced your date to take a shower with you the GHB is kind of redundant
It's sort of like poppy seed bagels (Score:5, Interesting)
Not exactly shocking for Orange County (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't mind a conservative government, and all, but here it's like being conservative just for the sake of being conservative, instead of any real reason behind the decisions of the local government. Law enforcement in Orange county seems to me, to serve mostly to harass the public, in hopes of catching some illegal immigrants along the way.
So yeah, this really isn't surprising.
P.S. In OC, if it had been a 30 y/o MILF in an SUV, she could have had the soap, had it tested positive for GHB, heck she probably could have had pure GHB and pot in the car, and still been able to drive off.
IT topic? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:It's not a matter of resources... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Bronner, not Bonner (Score:2, Interesting)
Compare with Deut 6:4
Re:It's not a matter of resources... (Score:5, Interesting)
The USSC (SCOTUS) considers the article 1, section 8 enumerated power to regulate interstate commerce ["among the several states"] to be the foundation of a rationale to regulate intrastate commerce. It considers the highly public listing of citizens as criminals to "not be punishment." It approves ex post facto laws without blinking an eye. It punts regularly on the government's blatant favoring of religion by law (fed and state.) It allows wiretapping without a warrant (and don't get me started on FISA.) It allows breaking into your home without notice. It allows theft of your home and property for any purpose whatsoever. It has had absolutely no problem turning consensual, personal, victimless choices into crimes.
Clearly, the USSC is long past being a useful institution, made up of shills for special interest groups (one of which is the government itself, of course.) It has zero problems pronouncing that black is white and night is day. This should not be a surprise, however, as the number of unauthorized government actions - meaning, absolutely unconstitutional - has skyrocketed in the past half century or so across the entire government structure, judicial, executive, and legislative. The USSC is just one part of an entirely corrupt and out of control government.
Remember to vote so you can pretend you have an effect on all this. That's what they want you to do. That, and complain. It vents the steam safely, as opposed to finding pissed off constituents at their doors. That is why freedom of speech is the least eroded right and will always remain so.
Re:Bleh... (Score:4, Interesting)
If we're going to give anyone credit for popularizing the Mohawk, let's give it to the Iroquoi. I mean, after all... a punk rock band? Hardly.
Re:Do your job "editors" (Score:4, Interesting)
By the way, it looks like this all fell down on him because he consented to a search of his vehicle. Take note, Slashdotters: you will never benefit by forfeiting your 4th amendment right to not be searched without a warrant, and the fact that you're not knowingly breaking any laws shouldn't make you feel like there's no way you can get arrested. Clearly, we've seen this is not the case.
Re:Test kit limitations (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Pop punk (Score:4, Interesting)
No real punkers call themselves punk - it's the attitude, not the music.
Re:It's not a matter of resources... (Score:2, Interesting)
Out of the 5 or 6 times it's happened to me, the P.O. let it drop at that. In the last case, he said he could get a warrant if we didn't consent, and in that case, he had probable cause regardless.
I don't doubt that there are bad cops out there, but you imply that they all are, and that's demonstrably false.
But then again, this is
Re:It's not a matter of resources... (Score:4, Interesting)
Screening tests. (Score:3, Interesting)
The test in question is a screening test. That is, a test that is designed to quickly eliminate the possability of a substance so you don't have to perform the more expensive and time consuming confirmation test. So, a negative result means the substance is not present, positive means it MIGHT be. If the police and/or courts don't understand that, they shouldn't be using the test at all.
Unfortunatly, apparently the test is marketed for use much as the police used it in this case.
The other problem in this case is that Bronner's is obviously soap. Just how did they imagine that GHB would even be (ab-)useful after mixing it into soap? What would have even lead them to believe the bottle contained GHB in the first place?
Re:All hail Wikipedia!! (Score:1, Interesting)
I had a cop try to tell me one time that a college professor's word was worth more than mine when the professor accused me of something. "Are you telling me that COLLEGE PROFESSOR lied."
Ohhh! Impressive! That's atleast like a +5 unrelated to credibility job title.
How about the boeing employee who lectured me about cellphones on an airplane after taking a 30 second call. "I work for Boeing and I'll have you know they do care!" Really? What do you do? Mop floors? I'm a fucking RF hobbiest you pretentious asshole. Judging from your lack of specificity on your job title I'm guessing that makes me more fucking qualified to talk about communications devices. I know well enough to know a 30 second call from a CDMA device while the airplane is fucking taxiing isn't going to cause any problems they haven't had before with no incident. Call me a fucking gambling man!
False Positives and Full testing (Score:3, Interesting)
Drug urinanalysis tests are notorious for false positives as well as true positives for common food stuffs which do carry the drug(s), but in minute quantities. I recall an entire class of substance abuse counselors in training being given surprise urinalysis so they'd know how it feels. They all tested positive, in testing and restesting. The culprit was poppy seed muffins supplied by the organization presenting the class. This was figured out by the instructor. Had it not been, or had this been one or more individuals really being tested for whatever reason, the samples would have been retained and passed to a lab for mass spectrometry. This test is many orders of magnitude more accurate. It absolutely identifies molecules present. It does not indicate the source. They'd have been considered positives, which is guilt by fairly irrefutible evidence, but not considered false positives due to circumstantial evidence. How many? I have no idea, in general. I do know that I, and those I worked with in substance abuse treatment, did inquire into possible sources, knowing of the above. All that I supervised admitted using, after giving bad excuses. I knew of the possible other sources -- they didn't. But then I worked for a facility which was owned by a medical corporation. They had potential liability and so expected us to be careful like this. Testing done by law enforcement and similar organizations are not considered as liable, as they themselves cannot be held as accountable. They can and do jail based on initial testing, even probable false positives and obvious ridiculous positives (how was he going to get the supposed intended victim to ingest enough soap?). However, they can be held accountable, especially in the press. Sad as the case is, this is probably the best chance the individual has for getting just due. With popular knowledge and support, any case would go more his way, and law enforement tends to go Tango Uniform when faced with the prospect. He could get damages if he pressed it. I hope his roasts the bastards.
Re:Do your job "editors" (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Do your job "editors" (Score:5, Interesting)
As to the warrentless searching of a car... In the US at least, this is all a moot point if you're a teenager. Despite that a lot of teenagers I know, especially ones who are in their final year of high school and are taking "US Government", probably know as much about the law as many cops, being a teenager is proof of guilt.
Case in point: I have a friend who has never in his life smoked a cigarette, done a drug, and the only alcohol he's consumed is when he visited an exchange student in Estonia (appearantly, said exchange student's uncle's thought it was funny to make the American toast the old Soviet Republic and drink Vodka). He is now 27.
When he was 16, he drove a wee little nissan, had long hair, and was in a punk band. He got pulled over on suspicion of being a teenager (as best he could tell, they never did tell him), and they asked to search his car. He said "No way, I know my rights, if you don't have a warrant, you can't search". Know what the cops told him? The fact that he didn't want his car searched was enough suspicion to get probable cause to secure a warrent, and that he'd have to sit on the road side with the cops for 45 minutes while they made out a warrent and got it authorized before he could leave.
Welcome to the land of if you're young, you're fucked.
Re:We'll get to see more like this (Score:3, Interesting)
Unfortunately, that's pretty much equivalent to saying "we need more resources, because we've been arresting innocent people left and right, searching for something that's next to non-existent". It's not going to make you very popular. It also just asks for the question, "then why are you _wasting_ manpower looking for something virtually nonexistant?"
You'll want to put it more like, "good Lord, look at all these junkies everywhere! We've been arresting them left and right, and we're still not getting to the bottom of it! Plus, our labs are so crappy, they let all those dangerous drug dealers go right after we've arrested them! We need better labs! We need more manpower! We need to get rid of the search and seizure limits! We need to be allowed to torture them into confessing! We need to get rid of lawyers! These fucking lawyers come get them out as fast as we catch them, on some 'it was just soap' bullshit! Yeah, right, soap my ass..."
It serves the same goal of getting bigger, but in a more productive way.
Actually, it helps if you don't even think of it as some sentient hive that tries to get bigger. It's just police officer X who thinks he'd get a promotion if he had more junkies busted and/or more subordinates to manage, marketroid Y who'd get a bonus if he sells more snake oil, etc. The effect is the same globally, it wants to grow, but it affects the behaviour quite a bit. You don't want to look like the guy who arrested innocents left and right, but as the guy who worked hard to make the community a better place and was just thwarted by those evil lawyers and those dumb limits on police power.
In the end, it's only natural. If someone's job performance and security is measured in problems to solve and in actually solving them, they'll try to maximize that. I see it daily in other domains too. So some will do just that. Others have just grown old and bitter and filter it all through the goggles of the worst people they dealt with: surely everyone else is a hardened criminal. Others are simply sociopaths and love abusing their power over others, stopping just short of the line where it would terminally bite them in the ass. Or not even there. Etc.
And it's damn tempting to see all those safeguards and presumptions of innocents, as just a bunch of crap that gets in the way of your getting the job done and getting a promotion.
In the end, that's why those safeguards are needed. Without them, the incentive is there to abuse the system, and there's no shortage of people who'll take that incentive.
See the Soviet police for example. They had very few unsolved cases. They'd just arrest the first suspect, or in some cases an innocent, and beat him up until he confessed. There you go, another case solved.
And yes, some are good cops anyway. Unfortunately there again, we need the safeguards to even be able to tell who is one and who isn't. Otherwise, in a parody of that economic wisdom, the bad cops push the good cops off the market. The bad ones are those who get all those cases solved fast, the good ones are those without half as many results. Unless the bad cops are stopped from faking it, they _will_ push the good cops out.
Re:It's not a matter of resources... (Score:3, Interesting)
Since you ask, the last time that I got pulled over was with my wife while we were riding our road bikes on the country roads near where we live.
They are very lightly traveled roads (probably 10 or so cars will pass us during a two-hour ride), so we were riding side-by-side when a large unrestrained dog who has been aggressive with us in the past began barking at us. Although state law permits bikes or motorcycles to be ridden side-by-side, we usually switch to single file when a car approaches from behind, but with our attention focused on the dog, we didn't see the two cars coming up behind us (one regular car followed by a county sheriff). Once we did see them (at most 30 seconds), we moved over and let them pass.
The sheriff, all red-faced, pulled along side of us and shouted "you have pull off the road when cars come up behind you!" This is totally false; bicycles have the same right to the road as any other legal vehicle so I said, "That's not my understanding of the law."
Well, since I had the nerve to disagree with his scholarly interpretation of the law, I was in for some general harassment.
He starts going on about how we were impeding him while he's on official businessthe and how the law doesn't allow us to ride side-by-side and I keep saying that that's not my understanding of the law. He says that he doesn't know the exact statute but, if I give him my name and phone number, he will call me with it. I say that I'm not comfortable with giving him that information.
By this time, another car has come up behind and the sheriff's car is blocking the oncoming lane, so I say, "in any event, I done talking to you, and besides, it looks like you're blocking traffic." Of course, this enrages him and he says something to the effect of "oh, so you think that you're funny?" I say, "what if I do, this isn't the Soviet Union."
At this point, he he pulls up in front of us and gets out and I say, "am I under arrest, or am I free to go?" He says that he is detaining me to give me a ticket, demands my ID and proceeds to his trunk to get out his State Revised Code book to find something to charge me with. We sit there for fifteen minutes and he can't find anything, so he calls into HQ to see if they can figure something out.
Listening to the police radio I could tell that they ran my ID and saw that it was clean. Then they realized that my wife is a prominent professional in town and I was a business owner. I assume that the person at HQ must have realized that they had a little problem on their hands and told the deputy that he better unfuck the situation. So he gets back out of the car and comes back with a whole different attitude saying that "it appears that we (meaning he and I) were both wrong." By that I guess that he meant that he was wrong about the law and I was wrong for insisting on having my rights.
In any event, he let us go, but I couldn't help but wonder if it would have turned out so well if my wife and I weren't both 40-something, white, middle-class, with squeaky-clean records.
I don't believe for a second that you aren't doing something suspicious.
That attitude of yours is exactly how the police get away with this shit. After all if someone gets arrested they must be guilty, right? If someone gets pulled over, there must be a good reason, right? Or maybe it's possible that the police might detain two perfectly law-abiding people doing absolutely nothing illegal, demand to "see their papers" and try to find something to charge them with. And why? Because they had the temerity to insist upon their rights and to "talk back."
Re:It's not a matter of resources... (Score:3, Interesting)
The sad thing is that your entire post is true, except the part about it not being useful, solely by virtue of being the least corrupt and out of control branch of government. It even occasionally stops some of the worst abuses of the other two branches of government with no outside prompting. It's kinda strange that this is mostly due to the Justices being unelected appointments for life. Yay democracy?