NY Police Confuse Candy for Crack, Hold Two Men for a Week

Found this today on officer.com.

New York police are refusing to apologize to two men arrested for drug possession and held for a week over what turned out to be a bag of candy.

Neal Wallerstein, a lawyer for Jose Pena, 48, and Cesar Rodriguez, 33, said the men stopped at a bodega before going to a party the night of Jan. 15 and police outside the store asked to search their van when the men emerged, the New York Post reported Monday.

"I said 'Go search.' I even opened the door," Rodriguez said.

He said police discovered a Hello Kitty sandwich bag full of white powder in the vehicle and handcuffed the men despite their protests that the powder was Coco Candy, a popular coconut-flavored confection.

The men were charged with possession of crack cocaine and taken to jail. Pena was held for three days, but Rodriguez spent five days in jail before police completed testing on the candy and dropped the charges.

Wallerstein said police should have realized the error more quickly.

"That's the reason why they have a field-test kit," he said.

The police department said it has no official comment on the case.

A few more details, including a $2M lawsuit, can be found here.

Not all in Uniform are Heroes

This is a blog where I hope to catalog abuses of those in uniform, or those connected to those in uniform. This will mean a majority of the posts will be links to stories of police misconduct and abuses by soldiers, but I hope to also touch on our criminal justice system and military spending.

This blog was inspired in part by an extremely depressing OpenLeft post called This Is Why We Torture, which I highly recommend reading in its entirety. In it, the author argues that torture is normalized in our society not only against the nondescript evildoer in Abu Ghraib or Gitmo, but against in our own country against protesters, the poor, the mentally ill, and numerous others. We as a society place a great deal of trust on those who wear uniforms, and not all of those that put on the uniform deserve it. I do not believe this to be a case of "a few bad apples," but a systemic problem.

However, anecdotes speak louder than statistics, so anecdotes you will get.