Bumbling US cops who raided a medical diagnostics center thinking it was a cannabis farm got a gun stuck to the powerful magnets of an MRI machine, a California lawsuit has alleged.
The owners of the facility are claiming damages against the Los Angeles Police Department for an operation their lawyers describe as “nothing short of a disorganized circus.”
Their lawsuit details how a SWAT team swarmed Noho Diagnostic Center after the squad’s leader persuaded a magistrate to issue a search warrant.
Officer Kenneth Franco drew on his “twelve hours of narcotics training” and discovered the facility was using more electricity than nearby stores, the lawsuit said.
“Officer Franco, therefore, concluded (the facility) was cultivating cannabis, disregarding the fact that it is a diagnostic facility utilizing an MRI machine, X-ray machine and other heavy medical equipment – unlike the surrounding businesses selling flowers, chocolates and children’s merchandise,” the suit said.
…
It gets worse:
Instead of seeking expert advice on how to retrieve the weapon, one officer decided to activate the emergency shutdown button.
“This action caused the MRI’s magnet to rapidly lose superconductivity, leading to the evaporation of approximately 2,000 liters of helium gas and resulting in extensive damage to the MRI machine,” the suit said.
The officer then retrieved his gun, but left a magazine full of bullets on the floor of the MRI office, the suit says.
When you’re never, ever, punished, eh who gives a fuck
Exactly, the city is going to be on the hook for this, at worst he’ll get a talking to by the chief.
I hope there are security tapes.
Body cam
Ha ! Good joke.
Name and Shame
Kenneth Franco
California still has a 10 round magazine capacity limit for ordinary private ownership, I believe. (Last I heard the ruling striking it down was stayed).
So, did this cop negligently just leave a super illegal thing (by California legal standards) on the floor for some medical technician to eventually pick up and get legally slapped for?
I get the feeling he was trying to get clear so he could deny he did it.
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TBF, If I saw a big red button labeled stop, I would have pressed it in that scenario, most emergency stops don’t destroy the entire system.
You would have pressed it to retrieve a personal item? Seriously? Like if you’re visiting a factory and your phone fell on the assembly floor you would run to the first red button you could find and press it without asking anyone? If so, please never get on an airplane.
I’m wondering the timeframe. Did the gun SWOOSH out of his hand and then he slammed the button right in front of him worried the gun was going to explode or something?
What’s unforgivable is cops in LOS ANGELES even using one penny of taxpayer dollars to even think about cannabis. I guess they’re protecting state coffers - illegal buds = no tax revenue.
I’d want them to respond to complaints about growers near schools or something… and try to be proactive I suppose if a residential neighborhood reeks…
But reviewing all business power consumption and going on fishing expeditions WTF?! In LA?!?
Like my redneck ass town wouldnt consider that enough due to the amount of folks qith home machine shops and specialist equipment. But somehow LA isn’t supposed to have that.
I mean… I kind of get it. The personal item happened to be a fucking gun. One with moving parts that will fire bullets if the wrong part moves. Your phone will not fire bullets. Seems kind of prudent to stop the machine with spinning magnets and wildly fluctuating magnetic fields from operating near a rifle that may cause it to fire.
I guaran-fucking-tee you that if they hadn’t shut it off, and the machine caused the firing pin to trip resulting in a bullet being fired and hitting someone, people would be saying “what stupid cops let the gun just sit there when they could have hit the emergency stop switch!”
However, the main issue is the rifle never should have fucking been there in the first place!
Cop gets the gun by destroying the machine: cop is dumb
Cop doesn’t get the gun and someone gets shot at: cop is dumb
Moral of the story: cop is dumb
If it was me, i would ask the people there how to retrieve my stuff… I might get into trouble but hey in this scenario im a police who lose their gun to MRI machine so I’ll look stupid either way
The people there were probably handcuffed on the floor and not in a mood to help.
With the benefit of hindsight we all would.
Also, the benefit of common fucking sense to ask the professionals before just hitting an emergency button when there’s no immediate danger.
The ones I’m familiar with don’t say stop on them and they have a plastic guard over them to make you be really sure you want to hit it. It also causes damage to our tools (giant electron microscopes) because it has to make itself safe instantly, which means neutralized a lot of electricity, various gasses, and mechanical parts in an instant.
But it’s also not unusual that E-Stops can cause severe damage to a machine when used. After all, such switches are meant to instantaneously bring everything to a screeching halt for safety reasons without worrying about the machine.
And in this case, the E-Stop is meant to prevent the MRI from exploding and sending pieces of shrapnel flying everywhere. MRI machines can be quite dangerous in operation.
MRI machines don’t explode and send shrapnel everywhere lmao.
The quench button is used if a person is pinned by a ferrous object, or if there’s a large fire in the room and firefighters need to get in the room.
The electrical E-stop button is used if the equipment is on fire, or if there’s flooding.
MRI machines do explode and send shrapnel everywhere. Emergency stopping them causes the helium that’s trapped in the part that rotates the magnets to become a gas, then expand as the magnets superheat. In some cases, this causes an understandable explosion.
Seriously happened once already this year https://healthimaging.com/topics/medical-imaging/magnetic-resonance-imaging-mri/mri-explosion-leaves-3-injured-including-2-hospital-staffers , the cop is lucky.
the part that makes the magnets rotate
The magnet doesn’t rotate like a CT. But you’re right that there is a vessel with supercooled helium.
But that’s the first time i’ve ever heard of this… It’s a philips, makes sense.
They’re supposed to be designed such that it is impossible. Looks like there was a major recall. Because again, that’s something that should never happen.
https://www.auntminnie.com/clinical-news/mri/article/15682270/mri-scanner-explosion-in-south-africa-injures-3
https://www.auntminnie.com/clinical-news/mri/article/15588232/mri-magnet-explosions-warrant-improved-venting-and-inspections
https://awesomejelly.com/mri-machine-explodes-into-a-million-pieces-due-to-pressure-build-up/
https://www.medtechdive.com/news/philips-mri-recall-explosion-risk/703309/
Just a small handful from a very fast search. Feel free to look for more with photos of the damage.
Not sure why you are downvoted. I think a rifle getting pulled into an MRI machine is as good a reason as any to hit the big red button.
I agree, imagine if you were just sitting around figuring out what to do and the gun went off in the MRI possibly killing someone. The mistake was entry in the first place, not this
a magazine full of bullets
I know this is just the reporter’s ignorance, but I’m imagining a magazine full of bullets, no cases, powder, or ever primers.
I don’t know about anyone else, but comments like this make me want to use firearms terminology incorrectly on purpose.
Even gun guys don’t think like this.
Sure they do. The gun clubs I’ve joined foster an environment that attracts people who demonstrate care and consideration in all aspects concerning firearms. If someone is lazy and imprecise in the manner in which they communicate about guns, that might also apply to their general demeaner. After speaking with some of these fellows during public range days, it’s not surprising when later they’re shooting holes in the shelter roof or bouncing ricochets off the top of the berm.
You misunderstood what I was talking about. I am saying if a non gun person says bullets they know exactly what they are talking about about and don’t feel a need to correct them. No need to be an asshole and say “Well ackshully”. Nobody likes that guy.
No misunderstanding - I get what you’re saying and I disagree.
I also don’t agree that expecting journalists to be accurate makes someone an asshole. If they were reporting on an automobile and wrote that the spark plugs make 500HP we could guess what they likely meant, but we’d also recognize the journalist’s ignorance. They should educate themselves on their subject matter so they can do their job properly.
Forgive my ignorance but isn’t a bullet made up by those things? Why would they need to mention the components of the bullet for it to make sense?
The word they were looking for is “cartridges”.
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Oh my god, you suck
Why are you so mean?
As opposed to a magazine of spent rounds?
Or dummy rounds (aka snap caps), or blanks…
Thankies for the explanation!
Came to the comments b/c I was wildly confused. Nowwww I get it, live round ammunition. Thank uuuu
Are you going to write a correction letter to the editor?
Yeah, it was an issue of Gun Lovers Monthly
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Raided based on nothing more than power usage. Ignored warning in place around the MRI to prevent an accident. Cops gun gets pulled out of his hands and he pull the emergency shutdown button. Now it will cost a couple of hundred thousand to get the MRI going again. Somehow the cops will blame someone else.
Also, they left behind a loaded magazine on the floor 🤣
Even Barney Fife is amazed at how terrible of a cop that dude is.
And if they do pay damages it comes out of your tax dollars. Great system all round.
Losing 2,000 litres of helium is possibly the worst part of this.
A large part of the price as well. Not to mention magnets that were destroyed.
Don’t know about MRI machines but reenergizing NMRs that were quenched is fucking expensive
I’m not completely sure but I think quenching MRI magnets is pretty permanent
I love how cops take less training to arrest people than I took to professionally reset passwords
AI RoboCop wants all the power for itself.
Another article said it was the office’s high power consumption and the SMELL of marijuana… in a state where marijuana is legal. And the ‘AC was too loud.’ And two people dressed similarly because I guess scrubs, uniforms, or a dress code are suspicious as hell. And security cameras. Like, holy goddamn shit guys. The officers, especially the team’s leader who requested the warrant and the judge who signed it, should be reprimanded for sheer incompetence.
If this is all it takes for a raid, my favorite cheap Chinese food spot should be raided, too. Hell, they get a ton of customers coming and going so they’re probably dealing, too!
According to the lawsuit, the raid of Noho Diagnostic Center stemmed from an LAPD officer’s application for a search warrant.
The officer said there had been a noise complaint about the medical center’s air conditioning units, and cannabis was possibly being cultivated inside, the complaint says.
He repeatedly surveilled the property in 2023 and reported the “distinct odor of live cannabis plant and not the odor of dried cannabis being smoked” — as well as tinted windows, security cameras and two people dressed similarly, according to the complaint.
The officer believed these were signs of a hidden marijuana growing operation, and efforts to expand it, the complaint says.
He also found that the medical center wasn’t licensed to grow cannabis and, because of this discovery, determined the facility was violating California’s health and safety code, according to the complaint.
The officer considered his observations as “probable cause for cannabis cultivation,” and a search warrant was issued, the complaint says.
Cops are not the only problem here.
Their lawsuit details how a SWAT team swarmed Noho Diagnostic Center after the squad’s leader persuaded a magistrate to issue a search warrant.
Leader and judge who issued should be fired and disbarred immediately. I feel like something should happen to the rank and file who follow such stupidity too but not sure what.
Yeah, good point. A judge signed a warrant on just ‘this place uses more electricity than others’? The court system’s just a rubber stamp at this stage.
Don’t forget the “distinct odor” lol. That just says to me that the cops lied through their teeth to get the warrant.
“I smelled weed” is the classic cop trick to skirt around probable cause.
the ‘odor’ was probably just ‘clean’, and mr copper doesn’t know what ‘clean’ smells like so it just had to be something super illegal.
Nah, they don’t get the benefit of the doubt anymore. “I smelled weed” has been used for decades to skirt probable cause requirements. Because it’s transient evidence that can’t be saved or replicated, and you can’t prove that they’re lying. You can be 100% clean, but a cop claims he smelled weed and now your car’s interior paneling is getting ripped out on the side of the highway.
The cop lied to get the search approved. No more, no less.
It may very well have been true because cancer patients get CT scans but that just goes to show how a smell shouldn’t be justification for a fucking raid.
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I can see it now. The first two cops enter the room and are instantly sucked into the MRI machine due to their guns and other metal items. They comically struggle to use their radio on account of being stuck to the machine. They finally manage to get to their radio and call for help. The moment backup arrives, they are sucked into the machine as well. The third cop lands with his crotch precariously close to the face of one of the other cops. More struggling continues. New guy can get to his radio just fine and radios for more backup. The first two try to stop him but to no avail. Again, backup arrives. Again, backup gets sucked into the machine. “Hey guys, I can reach my radio just fine. I’ll call for backup.” Cue the chorus “NOOOOOOOO!”. He stops. They have a debate over how to explain the predicament to the next round of backup they need to call. They bicker a bit, but settle on an extremely nuanced and verbose message. The reply comes out static-y but they rejoice as surely they’ll be saved. Door opens. “You were breaking up. What were you trying to… AHHHHHH!” Sucked into the machine. Curtains close on the cast bickering.
You forgot the bit where they have a gun duel thru the MRI machine where all the bullets get suspended in the field and they still do matrix style moves amd think they are dodging.
07/16/1980
It wasnt great before that either, but I think the element of frustratingly silly was added about then.
Or Benny Hill. I can hear Yackety-Sax playing while they run around the place and end up with their gun stuck to the MRI machine.
Harambe 🦍
Real life has always been either Pythonesque or the 3 Stooges. And as far as anyone can tell, is unlikely to ever be fixed.
Satire and real life have always been very close.
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Radiologist here. There are multiple safety zones (four to be precise) around the machine and extensive screening procedures are required to access the inner zones. The magnet of an MRI is always on and extremely strong. However, you need to be pretty close for it to pull a gun from your hands. Like, less than a few meters. That would be zone 4. He should never have been that close.
The button he pressed is called a quench. It’s for life threatening emergencies only. Think “patient trapped between the machine and a metal object.” It vents the liquid helium used to keep it superconductive and basically destroys the machine, but the magnetic field dissipates in minutes. There is a way to wind the machine down without destroying it in situations that aren’t life threatening or for servicing, but it takes hours for the magnetic field to dissipate and even longer to bring it back.
Thanks, Doc! Very useful context.
While I knew these machines are really dangerous to bring metals to anywhere near it; it’s quite interesting to know that there is a fail safe for these cases.
That’s not what a fail-safe is. A fail-safe is just what it says: the device fails into a safe configuration. In this case, someone has to press a button to quench the magnet, which is not really a failure mode of the machine.
A typical fail-safe is something like a solenoid valve. The valve has a default position when no power is given to the solenoid, and you should design your machine so that the default position is safe (whether that be open or closed). The most likely failure mode is a power loss, so the configuration is said to be fail-safe.
So way more than the 200k price tag I saw the other day.
Really that long to normally wind it down. The town where grew up had a mobile mri back in 90s. It would show for about a week each month. Would they turn it off over the last day to move it?
This was almost certainly an older style of MRI that didn’t use superconductors. You could turn these off and on, but the strength of the magnetic field was much lower that what can be achieved with superconductors.
I also looked up the wind down time and I was mistaken. It’s a day long process to wind down and wind back up and MRI and do all of the testing and adjustments, but the loss of the magnetic field happens in a few hours. I edited my post.
Last I heard from my father was around 4 hours for theirs. Though he’s an Anesthesiologist so not directly involved in those processes.
Could you unplug your MRI machine and put a Kil-a-Watt on it for me? I’m really curious how much they consume at idle.
These machines are typically wired to electrical directly. I would expect they are powered using 480 VAC. Google states they typically use about 14kw in standby mode and up to 80 kw for a scan.
If I ever saw a building using more power, my automatic assumption would be a big machine is inside.
If it were ridiculously high, then my next guess would be a crypto mining farm.
Ain’t no way modern LED lamps for growing plants gonna be drawing that much power.
Not to mention any of these fools could have just as easily sent someone inside to check. Or if they really wanted to play coppers so bad, book a fake appointment or even just pretend to be a news agency to ask for a tour.
Depends on the scale; modern LEDs just means you can make the farm bigger for the same level of power consumption. There’s also dehumidifiers, which suck a decent amount of power because they’re basically AC units.
Still, I think crypto farm would be my first guess if there’s no obvious other reason for the power usage (which in this case there is, it’s a fucking medical imaging place)
They didn’t wanna play private investigator, plus there’s extra legal shielding for a cop to be a dumbass than for them to actually know their stuff; it’s also not very likely of them to have a higher level education either sadly. Maybe they attend PragerU or something to pretend intelligence.
The swat leader had over 12 hours of narcotics training. Pretty much a PhD.
If their DoorDash/UberEats driver had 12 hours of experience, they’d complain and probably get them fired after they give enough low ratings. If they were working based on a public rating system they would already be fired.
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Even worse - they knew full-well that it was a medical office by the point this happened. He was just poking around the expensive shit when he lost his gun.
And then he burned probably millions of dollars when he pushed the purge button.
The summary just says gun, so I assumed hand gun. it was a rifle.
Hahaha that so Mich more amusing. The guy had to keep watch on his rifle stuck on a MRI machine <3
Even worse, he quenched the superconductor instead of waiting! Then took his gun back but forgot a mag on the floor!
That amazing, you can’t fake this level of dumb. The guy panicked and excavated things.
I would watch a cop show where they reenact all these dumb cop situations, like the acorn incident, fake fentanyl fainting, etc.
Law and Odor
…need ideas for names
Chups
I’ve never really seen Reno 911 other than clips, but this sounds like Reno 911.
It’s all I could think with the acorn situation. Just need a splash of dash-cam pov overview and it’d be straight out of the show.
ah, you’re right, I can’t believe I forgot about that show. 🤦♂️ 👍
Law and Order:
Specially Educated Unit
New Boot Goofin.
Law and Oinker
The Naked Gun 444+¼
Who numbered this, Hideaki Anno?
More like Naked Gun 420 6/9
That was a hilarious read. It just kept getting better, like I was reading Yakety Sax.
Maybe this could have been avoided if he only had 13 hours of training… 😥
But for real, I hope they pull the money from the pension of everyone involved, and then fire everyone involved for being literally to fucking stupid. So many people had an opportunity to do anything, to use a brain cell, but not a single one did.
Nope. The tax payers will pickup the tab.
Same as it ever was
I feel like all public servants (including cops) ought to have public liability insurance, where money would end up coming from in these situations, which then the employer (police department, other department) needs to pay, the employee is aware of, and is part of their renumeration (i.e. the more their premiums cost, the less they’re making), making idiots more of a financial liability to themselves.
Quite quickly you’re going to have people acting as responsibly as possible if you’re insurance premiums then go up when you act like a moron.
Obviously this would require protections so that people don’t end up being screwed over by insurance premiums, but still, this seems to be an issue in public service all over the world, no consequences because the tax payer just ends up footing the settlement, and the public servant goes on their merry way.
I doubt the insurance for this would be feasible cost wise. It’s easier to blame the victims. Police is never accountable for their actions. It’s a perk of this job.
They’re already exists a police liability insurance market, NPR’s Planet Money podcast have an episode about it.
it’s just tax money, that’s all
At the end of the article, which is already a litany of clownish buffoonery, it states that after destroying (effectively) the MRI machine in order to retrieve the rifle, he failed to retrieve a loaded magazine. So it was just left on the floor as they left.
Edit: autocorrect had changed it to clownfish
I don’t know which part is worse, that they destroyed a several hundred thousand dollar machine for a fucking gun, that they left the magazine behind, or that they did all that for cannabis.
They wouldn’t be able to get it out otherwise.
There are ways to get it without destroying the machine. If it’s an electromagnet it will cost you several thousand dollars because there is cooling helium inside you have to remove, but you can stop it. Even if it’s a permanent magnet there are techniques to remove metal objects. Incidents with metal objects in these rooms happen all the time in hospitals.
I don’t get why you would defend this stupid cop, especially by making stuff up. A medical device like an MRI scanner is infinitely more important than a gun, for god’s sake. Even if we assume they cost the same, what deserves to be saved is the medical device.
Are the cops routinely getting copies of electric bills?
Yes. As well as water bills.
And in my area its common to see drones doing line by line sweeps at night and everyone just seems unnervingly ok with that. What they are doing there is probably looking for the heat from ballasts from light but also the barometric pressure inside of homes and other buildings which can indicate if you’re cooking meth or things like that.
Its all fucked up and a complete over reach but they definitely use any data they can to nail balls to the wall.
Obviously if you live in a suburb its going to be different than if you live in the hood and use 2x more electricity and water than anyone else in the area.
Be nice if they put that much effort into finding missing kids or not letting people like Epstein go free after they get caught the first time. But there is just so much money to be made when you can set up drug dealers and steal all their money and shit.
If the city is also the utility provider it’s stupidly easy.
LA does have municipal power.
A lot of that information can be weirdly public. Looking up property records often comes with data about utility bills and taxes, and their payment statuses.
Instead of seeking expert advice on how to retrieve the weapon, one officer decided to activate the emergency shutdown button.
That is criminal levels.of negligence, and they should be fully responsible for all damages to the machine and the business
A spokesman for LAPD told AFP the department does not comment on open or pending litigation
I bet you don’t
