Read the whole article because it’s hilarious.
Officers allegedly raided the diagnostic center, located in the Van Nuys neighborhood of Los Angeles, thinking it was a front for an illegal cannabis cultivation facility, pointing to higher-than-usual energy use and the “distinct odor” of cannabis plants, according to the lawsuit.
MRI machine probably draws quite a bit
The real takeaway here is that they bullshitted smelling an odor of cannabis when there was none as an excuse to justify starting the raid in the first place. Some officer(s) lied on a form somewhere.
Didn’t they recently rule that cops can no longer use the “I smelled weed” excuse as reasonable suspicion/probable cause? Maybe that was just one state.
Seems doubly ridiculous that this happened in California
And if it did smell like weed near the MRI place, you know what I’d suspect? That’s a venn diagram with cancer patients in the middle.
You really want to crack down on cancer patients?
The answer has always been yes.
Look, WA was one of the first states to legalize, just weeks after CO. There was a police officer in Seattle who had to be reassigned because he kept writing tickets to people with weed even though it was legal. The point? Right-wing nuts are antisocial.
Arizona was sending people to prison even though they had the medical marijuana card on them. It took the State Supreme Court to tell them they couldn’t just redefine words to say the new law didn’t count for edibles and vapes.
Holy shit, they pulled the emergency release on one of those MRI machines. I think that adds a zero or two to the cost of bringing back online.
Yeah, quenching the machine makes bringing it back online $200k+ depending on the system
An officer then allegedly pulled a sealed emergency release button that shut the MRI machine down, deactivating it, evaporating thousands of liters of helium gas and damaging the machine in the process. The officer then grabbed his rifle and left the room, leaving behind a magazine filled with bullets on the office floor, according to the lawsuit.
The shutdown did have to happen (because the cop is a dumbass) but it obviously should have been done by someone who knows what they are doing. The guy should be suspended for being a dumbass and also for leaving his loaded magazine.
To give some background on this, the huge magnetic field in an MRI machine is created by a superconducting magnet. A magnetic coil submerged in liquid helium that keeps it ultra cold has virtually no resistance, so the electricity can keep going round and round and round like a racetrack without being bled off by resistance. This lets the machine maintain a very high magnetic field with very little power input.
An MRI technician can gradually ramp up or down the magnetic field power by slowly adding or removing current from the magnet. To retrieve the officer’s rifle, they could have slowly ramped down the power with a magnetic power supply while the magnet stayed cold.
When the guy slams the emergency button that does what’s called a quench. It adds resistance to the magnet, which starts turning that power into heat, and that heat boils off all the liquid helium and rapidly ramps the magnet down to zero. This should only be done if for example a patient is trapped in the machine by a metal object or similar emergency, because it damages the magnetic coil and also boils away the liquid helium, which itself is worth thousands of dollars.
LAPD (or more specifically, the California taxpayers) are in for a pricey repair bill.
He probably shit his pants at the deafening sound of an MRI machine being quenched, and had to leave quickly to change them.
The mechanism they are describing here is the emergency one (like if a human is trapped against the machine by something metal and is being crushed - you need to kill the magnet NOW). There is a slower, much safer mechanism for deactivating the magnet that should have been used here but that would require the officer admitting he had made a mistake and asking for help.
Also I just want to point out that the rifle should be considered no longer safe to use unless thoroughly inspected by an expert. In a similar case some years back, the police officer’s sidearm was pulled into the machine. After retrieval it was found that the weapon had been magnetized by the scanner and as a result the firing pin was able to spontaneously release.
After retrieval it was found that the weapon had been magnetized by the scanner and as a result the firing pin was able to spontaneously release.
Just hit it against a table a bunch while shouting “stop being a magnet”.
The judge that signed the warrant needs to be removed from the bench as completely incompetent. A simple inquiry into the type of business would have resolved the power consumption issues and belie the weed smell as the lie it was.
Some days I feel like the only thing I can do to make a difference is become a cop and do nothing but arrest wealthy people and state that their property was used in the furtherance of a crime. Just start doing asset forfeiture against everyone and anything that currently believes themselves insulated.
Hell, become a cop and use asset forfeiture on the police station because we have public record of the crimes they’ve perpetrated.
