Florida is famous for its wackiness, and here’s more proof that the Sunshine State is the best when it comes to weird crime tales.
A police officer from Orlando is being disciplined for thinking a man’s doughnut glaze was crack cocaine and arresting him. The report, which was finalized this week, states that Cpl. Shelby Riggs-Hopkins was not acting with bad intentions, she just didn’t know how to use the department-issued drug-test kits. (But, according to the Orlando Sentinel‘s report, she wasn’t alone: No one from the department was actually trained on how to use the kits.)
The arrest actually took place back in December 2015, when retired city of Orlando employee Daniel Rushing was arrested at a downtown 7-Eleven. Police had been watching that store following reports that drug deals were happening there, and Rushing got caught up in it. He was pulled over for speeding when Riggs-Hopkins saw a “rock-like substance on the floor board”. According to the report, Riggs-Hopkins ran the test three times. One of the tests, the one she did right, came up negative, but the other two came up positive.
In the arrest report, she wrote: “I recognized through my 11 years of training and experience as a law enforcement officer the substance to be some sort of narcotic.” Rushing, however, maintained his innocence the entire time. “I kept telling them, ‘That’s … glaze from a doughnut.’” he said, “They tried to say it was crack cocaine at first, then they said, ‘No, it’s meth, crystal meth.'”
Rushing was taken to jail and strip-searched before he was released on a $2,500 bond. After a few weeks, a state crime lab tested the glaze and determined it was not an illegal substance, so the charges were dropped. Riggs-Hopkins was given a written reprimand for making the false arrest, but Rushing is suing the city and the manufacturers of the drug testing kit.