No Mississippi adult wants to experience the fear and stress of realizing a cop is pulling them over. What can magnify your worries is a police officer administering drug tests. Regardless of what police officers in real life or on television might have you believe, some tests that law enforcement uses aren’t as reliable as you may think.
What is a field test kit?
Police officers can test people they suspect are under the influence of alcohol or drugs. A chemical drug test is a small packet claiming to change colors when its content interacts with a drug like cocaine.
While they might appear and sound reliable, chemical roadside tests are causing lots of problems for both civilians and police departments. It makes sense to wonder why any police department would use a test that sometimes proves ineffective. Some experts believe police officers receive and use these tests because they’re inexpensive. Basing someone’s future on the result of cheap tests is understandably concerning.
An uncertain future for roadside drug tests
Considering the seriousness of drug charges, many legal defense teams want cases relying on such a cheap and ineffective test to be inadmissible. According to several recent cases, judges are beginning to agree about the ineffectiveness of chemical roadside drug tests.
A recent incident presenting the problems of unreliable testing happened several years ago throughout Nevada leading to multiple incarcerations. The drug charges that led to these incarcerations resulted from chemical roadside drug tests. Eventually, a more accurate testing method would reveal that the chemical test repeatedly misidentified white powder as cocaine.
Chemical field tests might be low-cost, convenient items for police officers to carry and use. However, departments are coming under fire after certain ones knew about ineffective chemical tests yet continued using them.
