Unreliable and Unchallenged: Police Field Drug Tests Are Sending Innocent People to Prison

‘At the outset of the 1990s, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department began making thousands of arrests every year using inexpensive test kits meant to detect illegal drugs. Officers simply had to drop suspected cocaine or methamphetamine — taken from someone’s pocket or the floorboards of their car — into a pouch of chemicals and watch for telltale changes in colors. Known as “field tests,” police embraced them as essential in busting drug users and dealers. Local judges became sold on the kits’ usefulness and prosecutors relied on them to quickly secure guilty pleas — hundreds upon hundreds, year after year.
All along, though, police and prosecutors knew the tests were vulnerable to error, and by 2010, the police department’s crime lab wanted to abandon its kits for methamphetamine and cocaine. In a 2014 report that Las Vegas police submitted to the U.S. Department of Justice under the terms of a federal grant, the lab detailed how the kits produced false positives.’
Read more: Unreliable and Unchallenged: Police Field Drug Tests Are Sending Innocent People to Prison