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> The tests are popular because they’re cheap, portable and can screen for drugs in mere minutes. It’s just not feasible to send all suspected drug samples to s

> The tests are popular because they’re cheap, portable and can screen for drugs in mere minutes. It’s just not feasible to send all suspected drug samples to state laboratories, which would be far more expensive and could take days or weeks to return results. Sounds like the govs problem, not the people accused of a crime. Limitations in testing do not justify using inaccurate tools. If it takes weeks, it takes weeks. Gov doesn’t get to ruin innocent lives just because it’s more convenient. At least, they shouldn’t… apparently they do

duskdozer 7mo ago
You know, why not just make it a lot faster and more convenient and just go by the expert assessment of the officer on scene? No need for all the bloat.
- fragmede 7mo ago
  I would dread the arrival of this officer/judge arriving on the scene.
- drfloyd51 7mo ago
  I. AM. THE LAW. Dreddful.
- Jimmc414 7mo ago
  Is this satire?
  - Zigurd 7mo ago
    Because this is HN, and especially because it's HN's audience reading it, this is a perfectly cromulent question.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  - ahhhhnoooo 7mo ago
    One hopes it's satire. Can't tell, unfortunately.
  - duskdozer 7mo ago
    Fair, was probably a bit too deadpan. Yes, satire.
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
t-3 7mo ago
Part of the problem is that public defence is extremely stressful and not particularly well paid, as well as being less prestigious than prosecution. Few are going to give their all to defend someone who has already "failed" a drug test. Better to sort out a quick plea deal and focus on cases that will impress private sector clients later. If you can get out of jail time with some deal that requires a fine and putting up with some annoyances, is it really worth fighting things out to prove your innocence and risk failing?
- kennywinker 7mo ago
  Right, on an individual level that makes sense - but whoever saw the error rate for this test (or lied about it to sell it) and approved it for use by police deserves jail time themselves. You’d think we’d have a mechanism to make that happen.
  - _DeadFred_ 7mo ago
    Get together a law firm to do a class action on behalf of all the people wrongfully convicted. Make it too expensive for companies to provide these sorts of services to the government. But the companies will be covered as 'agents of the state' and given qualified immunity.
    - kennywinker 7mo ago
      So, an unaccountable system.
- alwa 7mo ago
  And, to put a charitable gloss on it—many of your clients who protest their innocence did actually have something true-positive on them. TFA cites manufacturers claiming a 4% false positive rate in lab conditions, and protesters claiming a 15-18% FPR in field conditions [*]. Offensive and intolerable in the aggregate, yes; but as far as base odds for any specific case in front of me? Assuming 18% of my defendants truly didn’t have drugs or drug residue on them, that still means 4 out of 5 of them did—and that the extra months of sitting in jail and fighting would lead nowhere for them. What’s 6 months of diversion by comparison? Even beyond the odds, how many of defendants’ claims are precise enough to implicate test accuracy specifically? “No, man, I swear I don’t do that stuff anymore” might be completely true and still result in a marginal-but-confirmatory lab result for the swab of the ol’ contraband satchel or whatever. Seems to me that’s the sort of stuff that the plea-negotiation part is for: instead of hoping expensive and slow science will give you certainty (or context), it’s “hey prosecutor, even if the test is right, we’re talking residue not bricks… diversion and call it a day?” I feel like, from the outside (and fed a steady diet of Law and Order television show), people grossly overestimate the degree of certainty embedded in a criminal conviction. I’m reminded of the classic Kalven and Zeisel study (1967) [1] finding, among other things, that judges and juries who sat through the exact same trial disagreed on guilt or innocence in up to 25% of cases. False convictions are outrageous, and I understand our individual instincts here to say “go to the mat for the truth!” But people are complicated, context is hazy, and there’s some irreducible residual rate at which any approach to justice gets it wrong. Which adds up to a lot more individuals than we’d like to assume. One of many reasons not to confuse the person with the bureaucratic record of the person. [*] Or, as the CNN person writes, a “91% error rate” per an NYCDOI study… guessing because there they were over-applying the tests in situations with extremely low base rates? At first I assumed this was a typical case of journalistic innumeracy, but reading through the study [0], they’re absolutely right and worth a quick aside: 91% really was the actual false positive rate the lab found in actual field tests. Surface swabs in a jail mail interdiction program, only examining the fentanyl tests, but still. It’s a wild read in all sorts of ways: there was a known reaction between the field test and chemicals in paper, but they used it for the mail anyway; the more false positives they saw, the more they panicked that all the mail had fentanyl in it. 89% of all the initial DOC field tests came back positive, 91% of those positives turned out to be false ones. The administration interpreted this to mean that all the inmates’ families were clearly “soaking envelopes in liquid fentanyl,” then mailing them to inmates to “chew.” The misconception led them all the way to trying to ban physical mail in the system. [0] https://www.nyc.gov/assets/doi/reports/pdf/2024/FieldTestingRpt11.20.2024.pdf https://www.nyc.gov/assets/doi/reports/pdf/2024/FieldTesting... [1] https://www.commentary.org/articles/abraham-goldstein/the-american-jury-by-harry-kalven-jr-and-hans-zeisel/ https://www.commentary.org/articles/abraham-goldstein/the-am... and replicated recently https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/facpub/343/ https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/facpub/343/
throwaway9980 7mo ago
Ruining innocent people’s lives is what government is best at doing. Don’t think of as convenient. Think of it as realization of purpose.
- swores 7mo ago
  Sorry but that's bullshit. It's extremely rare for any part of government to have that as an intended purpose. But it's extremely common, unfortunately, for people involved to be willing to accept that as a side effect in pursuing whatever their goals are - whether that's gaining funding for their police department, or raising political donations from the owners of a private prison, or keeping poor people away from their beautiful upper middle class neighbourhood, or environment-ruining chemical company, or... whatever.
  - 20after4 7mo ago
    A system’s purpose is what it does, not what it claims to do.
    - therealdrag0 7mo ago
      [flagged]
      - salawat 7mo ago
        Will say every benefactor of people not thinking that way. The rest of us, on the other hand, look at the objective results and realize if you want them to change, you have to change the system.
        therealdrag0 7mo ago
        Well duh. “A system will do what it does” is true, but that should not be conflated with its intent or purpose or design which require understanding of human intent. And humans produce unintended results all the time.

duskdozer 7mo ago

You know, why not just make it a lot faster and more convenient and just go by the expert assessment of the officer on scene? No need for all the bloat.

fragmede 7mo ago
I would dread the arrival of this officer/judge arriving on the scene.
drfloyd51 7mo ago
I. AM. THE LAW. Dreddful.
Jimmc414 7mo ago
Is this satire?
- Zigurd 7mo ago
  Because this is HN, and especially because it's HN's audience reading it, this is a perfectly cromulent question.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- ahhhhnoooo 7mo ago
  One hopes it's satire. Can't tell, unfortunately.
- duskdozer 7mo ago
  Fair, was probably a bit too deadpan. Yes, satire.

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

t-3 7mo ago

Part of the problem is that public defence is extremely stressful and not particularly well paid, as well as being less prestigious than prosecution. Few are going to give their all to defend someone who has already "failed" a drug test. Better to sort out a quick plea deal and focus on cases that will impress private sector clients later. If you can get out of jail time with some deal that requires a fine and putting up with some annoyances, is it really worth fighting things out to prove your innocence and risk failing?

kennywinker 7mo ago
Right, on an individual level that makes sense - but whoever saw the error rate for this test (or lied about it to sell it) and approved it for use by police deserves jail time themselves. You’d think we’d have a mechanism to make that happen.
- _DeadFred_ 7mo ago
  Get together a law firm to do a class action on behalf of all the people wrongfully convicted. Make it too expensive for companies to provide these sorts of services to the government. But the companies will be covered as 'agents of the state' and given qualified immunity.
  - kennywinker 7mo ago
    So, an unaccountable system.
alwa 7mo ago
And, to put a charitable gloss on it—many of your clients who protest their innocence did actually have something true-positive on them. TFA cites manufacturers claiming a 4% false positive rate in lab conditions, and protesters claiming a 15-18% FPR in field conditions [*]. Offensive and intolerable in the aggregate, yes; but as far as base odds for any specific case in front of me? Assuming 18% of my defendants truly didn’t have drugs or drug residue on them, that still means 4 out of 5 of them did—and that the extra months of sitting in jail and fighting would lead nowhere for them. What’s 6 months of diversion by comparison? Even beyond the odds, how many of defendants’ claims are precise enough to implicate test accuracy specifically? “No, man, I swear I don’t do that stuff anymore” might be completely true and still result in a marginal-but-confirmatory lab result for the swab of the ol’ contraband satchel or whatever. Seems to me that’s the sort of stuff that the plea-negotiation part is for: instead of hoping expensive and slow science will give you certainty (or context), it’s “hey prosecutor, even if the test is right, we’re talking residue not bricks… diversion and call it a day?” I feel like, from the outside (and fed a steady diet of Law and Order television show), people grossly overestimate the degree of certainty embedded in a criminal conviction. I’m reminded of the classic Kalven and Zeisel study (1967) [1] finding, among other things, that judges and juries who sat through the exact same trial disagreed on guilt or innocence in up to 25% of cases. False convictions are outrageous, and I understand our individual instincts here to say “go to the mat for the truth!” But people are complicated, context is hazy, and there’s some irreducible residual rate at which any approach to justice gets it wrong. Which adds up to a lot more individuals than we’d like to assume. One of many reasons not to confuse the person with the bureaucratic record of the person. [*] Or, as the CNN person writes, a “91% error rate” per an NYCDOI study… guessing because there they were over-applying the tests in situations with extremely low base rates? At first I assumed this was a typical case of journalistic innumeracy, but reading through the study [0], they’re absolutely right and worth a quick aside: 91% really was the actual false positive rate the lab found in actual field tests. Surface swabs in a jail mail interdiction program, only examining the fentanyl tests, but still. It’s a wild read in all sorts of ways: there was a known reaction between the field test and chemicals in paper, but they used it for the mail anyway; the more false positives they saw, the more they panicked that all the mail had fentanyl in it. 89% of all the initial DOC field tests came back positive, 91% of those positives turned out to be false ones. The administration interpreted this to mean that all the inmates’ families were clearly “soaking envelopes in liquid fentanyl,” then mailing them to inmates to “chew.” The misconception led them all the way to trying to ban physical mail in the system. [0] https://www.nyc.gov/assets/doi/reports/pdf/2024/FieldTestingRpt11.20.2024.pdf https://www.nyc.gov/assets/doi/reports/pdf/2024/FieldTesting... [1] https://www.commentary.org/articles/abraham-goldstein/the-american-jury-by-harry-kalven-jr-and-hans-zeisel/ https://www.commentary.org/articles/abraham-goldstein/the-am... and replicated recently https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/facpub/343/ https://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/facpub/343/

throwaway9980 7mo ago

Ruining innocent people’s lives is what government is best at doing. Don’t think of as convenient. Think of it as realization of purpose.

swores 7mo ago
Sorry but that's bullshit. It's extremely rare for any part of government to have that as an intended purpose. But it's extremely common, unfortunately, for people involved to be willing to accept that as a side effect in pursuing whatever their goals are - whether that's gaining funding for their police department, or raising political donations from the owners of a private prison, or keeping poor people away from their beautiful upper middle class neighbourhood, or environment-ruining chemical company, or... whatever.
- 20after4 7mo ago
  A system’s purpose is what it does, not what it claims to do.
  - therealdrag0 7mo ago
    [flagged]
    - salawat 7mo ago
      Will say every benefactor of people not thinking that way. The rest of us, on the other hand, look at the objective results and realize if you want them to change, you have to change the system.
      - therealdrag0 7mo ago
        Well duh. “A system will do what it does” is true, but that should not be conflated with its intent or purpose or design which require understanding of human intent. And humans produce unintended results all the time.