“You are judged by numbers in the lab,” McShane said. “There is a culture of pressure to get it done with no new ­resources.

One day I got off the subway at Grand Concourse / Fordham Road. As it went though the exit gate, there were undercover policemen, pointing and signaling for the young black and Hispanic males to go stand against a wall, where other police were going through their pockets. There were some fifteen to twenty kids there and more being added all the time. So I withdrew to a place where I could watch the action without being seen by the police. I couldn’t stay long because I had things I had to get done, but for the 15 minutes I watched, all of these kids were being held there. Even those whose pockets the police had already gone through. They had to wait for permission to leave and it wasn’t going to be forth coming anytime soon.

Now, just try to imagine yourself being held by policemen, against a wall where there’s a constant stream of passengers from the neighborhood passing by looking at you and wondering what you had done. Out of 800,000 stop and frisks, 90% were Black and Hispanic the police found only 300 guns.

If the big guns in the legal profession don’t help stop this slow progression towards a totalitarian state, one day they’re going to wake up and discover that some one high in gov’t has convinced the public to grant him the power to arrest people without charge, hold them indefinitely without judicial review and subject them to whatever they define as “enhanced interrogation techniques”. When that day comes police, judges and other legal workers, will no longer be “Law Enforcers” they will become mere “Enforcers”.
Because, when “law” is defined as whatever you want it to be, it’s no longer law.

The last time this happened, I understand, the powerful people, lawyers, doctors, captains of industry and politicians, all believed that the man, upon whom they were being asked to confer absolute power, would remain under their control. So, they gave him absolute power and he roasted them with it. Do we really have to see that happen again?

Finding that out shocked the Hell out of me and I’m still trying to not go crazy about knowing it.

Knowing too much about something like that just effs everything up. Sometimes I wish I could un-know stuff.

Also: Maybe she was hired to be the “bad apple” that would bring the for-profit-lab a whole lot of “war on drugs” work. My guess is the lab that gets the most positives gets the most assignments.

I’ll bet there were cases where even the prosecutors were surprised by the results. They accepted them, of course, but they were surprised by them for various other reasons. Like the accused being so far from the profile, they expected a negative result. I mean really, a grandfather bus driver with a pound of cocaine in his car? Dealers in that quantity don’t drive buses. But it came back positive so who cares?

The damage to this guy, his family and society is incalculable!
How could the “powers that be” be so callously unconcerned as to allow labs to make these decisions, without having the highest degree of scrutiny to shoulder?