4 ms·

Except you are testing people who are specifically under suspicion, not the general population. The concern here is that it does not appear that these tests are

by phonon 10y ago

Except you are testing people who are specifically under suspicion, not the general population. The concern here is that it does not appear that these tests are anywhere near 99%/99%...maybe it should be good enough to arrest someone on the scene, but a lab test should be the immediate follow-up, EVERY TIME, not "well maybe we'll do it when we go to trial."

runako 10y ago
NB: In America, people are often under suspicion simply due to their ethnicity. QED this isn't good enough to arrest people in America.
akiselev 10y ago
Based on my experience with the police in Los Angeles and the article, it seems that they are basically just randomly testing the general population, except maybe with a little filter. The heuristics cops use for "suspicion" are often very biased and caught up in socioeconomics or racism. I wouldn't be surprised if their filters reduced the sample pool by a factor of 2 or 3 which I don't think is enough for probabilities that justify evidence "beyond the shadow of a doubt"
- bryondowd 10y ago
  The legal standard is beyond reasonable doubt, not beyond the shadow of a doubt. It's intentionally left fuzzy to allow prosecution in cases where absolute certainty is impossible, but we as society still need to have a decent chance of prosecuting offenders. We try to minimize the number of innocents who are wrongfully convicted, but there's always going to be some, otherwise there would be entire classes of crimes that would be almost completely unenforceable, due to their nature. That said, this article made me sick. It's obvious that the system is failing here, probably due to a combination of factors, including a lack of understanding of the accuracy of these tests as well as the filtering used to select who and what gets tested. Even if your test was 99.99% accurate, if officers spend all day gathering crumbs from people's cars and submitting them, and you end up with hundreds of millions of innocent samples to thousands of actual drug samples, you wind up with tens of thousands of false positives. So what we really need is corroborating evidence to get a sample set more skewed toward actual positives. Or just give up and stop trying to enforce possession laws.
  - sixothree 10y ago
    I don't consider it reasonable that 1 in 100, 1 in 10000 people would falsely end up in jail.
Jtsummers 10y ago
"Under suspicion"? A traffic stop is sufficient to garner suspicion. Not looking high, not acting high, just being stopped for any ordinary traffic violation is enough.
michaelmrose 10y ago
If the effect of getting arrested can in and of itself be life destroying then perhaps its far more rational to keep the evidence for further testing and act if and only a real lab finds the evidence compelling. If the offender is from out of town and skips that is unfortunate but not as unfortunate as wrecking peoples lives.

by phonon 10y ago

runako 10y ago

NB: In America, people are often under suspicion simply due to their ethnicity. QED this isn't good enough to arrest people in America.

akiselev 10y ago

Based on my experience with the police in Los Angeles and the article, it seems that they are basically just randomly testing the general population, except maybe with a little filter. The heuristics cops use for "suspicion" are often very biased and caught up in socioeconomics or racism. I wouldn't be surprised if their filters reduced the sample pool by a factor of 2 or 3 which I don't think is enough for probabilities that justify evidence "beyond the shadow of a doubt"

bryondowd 10y ago
The legal standard is beyond reasonable doubt, not beyond the shadow of a doubt. It's intentionally left fuzzy to allow prosecution in cases where absolute certainty is impossible, but we as society still need to have a decent chance of prosecuting offenders. We try to minimize the number of innocents who are wrongfully convicted, but there's always going to be some, otherwise there would be entire classes of crimes that would be almost completely unenforceable, due to their nature. That said, this article made me sick. It's obvious that the system is failing here, probably due to a combination of factors, including a lack of understanding of the accuracy of these tests as well as the filtering used to select who and what gets tested. Even if your test was 99.99% accurate, if officers spend all day gathering crumbs from people's cars and submitting them, and you end up with hundreds of millions of innocent samples to thousands of actual drug samples, you wind up with tens of thousands of false positives. So what we really need is corroborating evidence to get a sample set more skewed toward actual positives. Or just give up and stop trying to enforce possession laws.
- sixothree 10y ago
  I don't consider it reasonable that 1 in 100, 1 in 10000 people would falsely end up in jail.

Jtsummers 10y ago

"Under suspicion"? A traffic stop is sufficient to garner suspicion. Not looking high, not acting high, just being stopped for any ordinary traffic violation is enough.

michaelmrose 10y ago

If the effect of getting arrested can in and of itself be life destroying then perhaps its far more rational to keep the evidence for further testing and act if and only a real lab finds the evidence compelling. If the offender is from out of town and skips that is unfortunate but not as unfortunate as wrecking peoples lives.