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.
…
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
What the fuck? Anyone mining crypto or running servers at home better watch out before their energy company tips off their local gang and gets them raided.
Go solar.
They also figure it out with FLIR cameras. A grow operation is going to produce a lot of heat.
This sometimes results in other amazing police work. Like going on the local news and showing the millions of dollars of marijuana plants that were seized in a raid. And then someone points out that they’re actually tomato plants.
I love when they quote how many ‘pounds of marijuana’ they got when they are weighing the growing medium, the full plant, seedlings, clones, etc .
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.
Literally dumb, dumber and dumbest cop (for not reading the sign saying to remove anything metallic from your person when entering a MRI room).
Drug dealer turns on MRI, NO YOU FREEZE!
Unfortunately turning on an MRI and building up the magnetic field takes hours
Officer Franco detected some dank-o. See the thrilling videos at 11!
Didn’t I read somewhere once that to be a cop, you can’t have an IQ over a certain threshold? I’m not sure if that was an urban legend or not, but this……
This certainly lends to its credibility.
It’s not an official requirement anywhere I’ve heard of, but I do recall cases where people have noticed police departments declining to hire apply who scored too high on their aptitude test. I think someone even sued over it, but the court found that being too smart was not a protected class, so the department was within their rights to do that. Or something like that, it’s been a while since that story broke.
Upvotes on this showing the level of critical thinking skills people here have.
Care to elaborate?
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.
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.
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.
Thanks, Doc! Very useful context.
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.
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.
Law and Order:
Specially Educated Unit
Law and Oinker
New Boot Goofin.
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
Are the cops routinely getting copies of electric bills?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You don’t just like roll an MRI machine into a building. There were probably several permits issued by the city that they could have looked up just like they did the power usage…but nah. Raiders gotta raid.
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.
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)
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!
Magsafe rifle. 😊
