[logfromblammo]

I upvoted this specifically so the people who still believe in the essential lawfulness of police would have a better chance of seeing it. The slang term is "testilying".

There is low conditional probability that a drug dealer smart enough to locate and remove a GPS tracker would put it in the same physical locker compartment as a crack pipe after taking it off.

Were I the judge, I would be especially wary of "automatic probable cause" objects that were coincidentally found with the search warrant target, namely "drug paraphernalia", "the distinctive odor of marijuana", and "the K-9 unit alerted".

Ask to see the glass pipe they found. Ask to see the photograph of it in situ next to the tracking device. Compare it very closely to evidence taken from previous drug cases. When the cops are unable to back up their bullshit story, throw their whole case out and cite someone for perjury.

[MFLoon]

> Were I the judge...

Your mental model of a typical American judges values is, unfortunately, unrepresentative in the extreme.

[logfromblammo]

My mental model of the typical American judge involves a lot of corner-cutting, and disdain for actually doing the job of applying reason and wise judgment to real-world situations, instead of just following a checklist of established procedures and conforming to precedent.

Judges tend to rule in favor of lawyers that do most of their work for them. It's a lot easier to get an order if the lawyer submits a draft order, and the judge can just sign it.

I get it. I also like to slack off and get paid. To be perfectly honest, I'd probably only double-check the evidence if a random number generator said to do it, based on the pre-established sampling rate setting in my judge-automation program.

[MFLoon]

I suppose I misspoke, your mental model sounds accurate XD. I wish there were a mandated evidence double check sampling rate! The point I was making is that I suspect in most courtrooms the rate is effectively 0.

[rosybox]

> so the people who still believe in the essential lawfulness of police

Your jaded perception of police is mistaken. You just hate the police and your argument doesn't make any sense.

> Ask to see the glass pipe they found. Ask to see the photograph of it in situ next to the tracking device. Compare it very closely to evidence taken from previous drug cases. When the cops are unable to back up their bullshit story, throw their whole case out and cite someone for perjury.

You want the judge to rule on a comparison of previous drug cases of how people store their drug pipes? The police need to back up their "bullshit" story because of this drug dealer didn't follow the drug pipe storage protocol others follow?

[logfromblammo]

No. My initial presumption is that the pipe they found with the tracker was actually taken out of the evidence room, from a previous drug case, and planted at the search site solely to justify a further search elsewhere on the property. The comparison would be to see if they were using the same piece of evidence for multiple cases.

It probably would have been easier to just watch the bodycam and dashcam videos.

[rosybox]

I imagine you can't just take a crack pipe from a previous case out of a police evidence room.

[logfromblammo]

Imagine harder. Can you imagine a cop being worse at their job than everyone you currently work with? If people could not take things from evidence, evidence would not go missing. It happens less in larger departments that have more secure protocols for evidence handling, but in those cases, the stuff mainly gets stolen by evidence tech employees that know better how to cheat the system. It disappears just as surely as merchandise is stolen from Wal-Mart by its own employees.

Even if it was not evidence from another case, I don't think that new glass drug pipes are hard to obtain. After all, cocaine addicts that have smoked up everything else in their life can still get them. Cops have closer physical proximity to that lifestyle, and could pick up an abandoned pipe from one place, and later drop it where it would be more useful.

This type of misbehavior has been documented on bodycams, when the cop thought the recording device was on standby. Drop contraband, turn on bodycam, "find" contraband, arrest suspect for possession of contraband. Cops that cut corners to take down drug dealers--or other people whom they just know are guilty--think they are doing the right thing.