Dollars to Donuts

Here's the deal: a police officer arrests a guy named Daniel Rushing for possession of four small flakes of crystal methamphetamine. This took place in Orlando, Florida, a couple of years ago. 

The arresting officer was Cpl. Shelby Riggs-Hopkins, who was sure she "saw meth" on the floorboard of Rushing's car. Rushing is 64 and  swears has never partaken of drugs in his life, not even so much as a cigarette. He told the corporal that, but she remained skeptical, since she didn't just become a police last week.

Rushing told Cpl. Riggs-Hopkins that what she saw was flakes from the glaze on a Krispy Kreme donut he had eaten in the car. She did not find this plausible, especially after two roadside drug tests she administered on the sweet bits tested positive for an illegal substance.

(I must say here that I have eaten exactly one (1) Krispy Kreme donut in my life, and within seconds of the first bite, it felt like my nerves were snapping like overstretched guitar strings. So there just might be something 'funny' in those bits she tested, after all! I don't know. What am I, a chemist?)

So off to the hoosegow goes Rushing in a rush (sorry) and 
he's booked and fingerprinted and all that, and then the city of Orlando stuck with the story for a while that the arrest was legal.

And then the results came back from the lab.

Krispy Kreme icing.

Charges were dropped, and now Rushing has a sweet $37,500 settlement.  The arrest has marred his chance of opening a security company. "I haven’t been able to work,” Rushing told the Orlando Sentinel. "People go online and see that you’ve been arrested."

The officer responsible was reprimanded, and all 730 members of  the Orlando Police Department ended up being retrained on how to do field testing correctly.

And Rushing, a retiree from the city Parks Department, got a check with enough dollars to buy $37,500 worth of Krispy Kremes.