9mo ago

US cops get gun stuck to MRI machine in bungled cannabis raid

www.yahoo.com

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.

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9mo ago

US cops get gun stuck to MRI machine in bungled cannabis raid

www.yahoo.com /news/us-cops-gun-stuck-mri-211134809.html

140 comments

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
  
  Name and Shame
- 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.
- 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.
  
  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 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.
  
  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.
  
  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?
  
  Yeah, it was an issue of Gun Lovers Monthly
  
  Are you going to write a correction letter to the editor?
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.
- 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 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.
- Real life has always been either Pythonesque or the 3 Stooges. And as far as anyone can tell, is unlikely to ever be fixed.
- Harambe 🦍
- Satire and real life have always been very close.
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.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
- 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!
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
- Law and Oinker
- New Boot Goofin.
The Naked Gun 444+¼
- Who numbered this, Hideaki Anno?
- More like Naked Gun 420 ^6/9
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
That was a hilarious read. It just kept getting better, like I was reading Yakety Sax.
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.
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.
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 applicants 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?
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
Could I theoretically make my home immune to guns by surrounding it with kevlar-coated MRIs
- I hope you and anyone in your immediate vicinity don't value your payment cards or electronic devices.
  
  Payment cards haven't used the magnetic stripe for ages. At least in Europe. Then again, in Europe I never felt the need of making my home gun proof...
  
  Who needs credit cards when I'm rich enough to build an above-ground bulletproof bunker powered by supercooled 5-tesla magnets
- If you can afford the machines and the associated power usage, yes. Though the magnets inside are what you really want and would be easier to set in place than the whole machine.
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 .
Magsafe rifle. 😊
Drug dealer turns on MRI, NO YOU FREEZE!
- Unfortunately turning on an MRI and building up the magnetic field takes hours
Literally dumb, dumber and dumbest cop (for not reading the sign saying to remove anything metallic from your person when entering a MRI room).
Officer Franco detected some dank-o. See the thrilling videos at 11!
I was so hoping this happened in a city named Keystone.

140 comments