Another bullshit passive-voice headline. Written implying the fault was not with the LAPD.
“LAPD officers destroy MRI machine in bungled pot raid”
One LAPD officer, “dangling a rifle in his right hand, with an unsecured strap, approached the MRI Office” and glanced at the large warning sign on the door that read: ‘Warning. Magnetic Field. High Frequency Yield. Metal Parts and Medical Instruments of All Types prohibited.’" He then walked into the MRI Office, according to the lawsuit.
If only those good ole boys and gals could read
Can we just stop prosecuting people for having weed, which is a harmless plant.
It’s better than the title implies. They also broke the MRI machine because they hit emergency stop buttons instead of stopping for a couple seconds to ask how to safely handle removing the gun.
(I’m not sure the cost difference between a graceful shutdown and an e-stop and can’t find information, but if it’s 250k worth of fix, I’m betting it’s significant.)
Yeah, and the magnet was not to blame for this incident despite how the title of this article reads. Given all the (alleged, I guess) facts of the case, I’m pretty sure sure the cops showed up in a clown car that played Yackety Sax when the horn was pressed.
The icing on the cake: „After retrieving his rifle, the officer is said to have accidentally left a magazine full of bullets on the floor of the MRI room.“
My uncle is a medical equipment installer that installs and calibrates MRI machines.
The issue is more than just the physical damage, which can be expensive, these machines take a long time to calibrate to the local environment. If the electromagnets are damaged, the whole set needs to be replaced, as they are manufactured in matching batches.
It’s like if you damage a piston in an engine, it will cause damage to the crank shaft, which will also damage the rest of the engine. It’s a helluva job to fix.
And they were there because the energy use of the MRI made them suspect it was a pot farm… in a legal state.
I agree with the legal state part, but it was not the energy use of the MRI; it was BS’d from the following:
“Franco conducted surveillance on multiple dates in 2023, reporting the ‘distinct odor of live cannabis plant and not the odor of dried cannabis being smoked,’ tinted windows–which he attributed to efforts to conceal cannabis cultivation, security cameras– which he associated with locations where cannabis is grown to prevent theft, and two individuals in similar attire at the premises – whom he concluded were performing maintenance or expanding the cultivation operation,” the lawsuit alleges.
That is… patently stupid.
Basically he smelled pot.
Thats the only suspicious thing in that chain of observations.
Literally every non-residential building has tinted windows in some way or another- it’s for energy conservation.
Every non residential and a fairly large number of residential buildings have cameras. Yes. To deter would be thieves, but mostly to show what happened and maybe whodunnit, if you’re lucky.
“Similar attire” what the fuck does that even mean? Uniformed? Scrubs? Shit. Everyone in almost every company all wear similar attire when going to work.
Usually job appropriate attire. Which means people doing the same job are going to be wearing “similar attire”.
“They appear to be wearing maintenance clothing- blue jeans, gray polo, tool belts that have [some kind of tools]” is a valid observation.
Or “they appear to all be wearing scrubs, as doctors and nurses wear” or “they appear to be wearing clean room suits”
But what isn’t a valid? “….to do maintenance or expand the operation.”
Well, you see a maintenance worker, them doing maintenance isn’t… too far a leap. But again, literally, every non-residential building has a maintenance guy. That ain’t suspicious.
Right?! And we can’t be sure he even smelled the weed he claimed to smell. The other things could be verified by being photographed or requesting documents. But the marijuana smell, the thing that probably made the warrant approvable at all, can never be verified. I wouldn’t be surprised if he made it up; hell, they do it during traffic stops so why not for a search warrant.
Tinted windows, security cameras, and uniforms…rock solid proof of a weed farm. /s
That describes 90% of the businesses I shop at.
Why do you shop at so many weed farms???
Sounds like you buy a lot of weed.
Tinted windows, security cameras, and uniforms
Distinct odor of live cannabis
I have no idea what that smells like, but this smells like a bunch of crap
Why would you conduct a raid without even finding out what the official listing for an address says they do there. Because in this case the bare minimum could have been 2 uniformed cops just ringing the bell… or an undercover/plain clothes cop making an appointment. But no… dicks out… full raid… probably good overtime.
IIRC the emergency stop vents the liquid helium, that’s a lot of the cost I imagine.
Yeah. The magnet quench flash boils a bunch of helium which is itself expensive, and presents a nice asphyxiation hazard as well. And then, assuming the quench damaged nothing, you have to set up the magnet again by getting the coils back down to superconducting temperatures… to get there, you end up boiling off a lot more helium. And then you have have to bring an engineer in to get the electrons spinning through the coil again and wait for the wobbles in the current to stabilize.
Or so I think. I work with NMR spectrometers and not MRIs, but it’s essentially the same technology.
There’s also a finite supply of helium/liquid helium and …it ain’t cheap to refill.
The biggest problem is that the magnets will “quench”, which is what happens when a superconducting electromagnet suddenly stops being superconducting.
There’s a lot of energy stored in that magnet, and when it quenches the energy all turns to heat in a very short time. Any remaining helium will flash boil, turning into an explosive expansion of gas, and the thermal shock will seriously damage the machine
Which, in older machines, might happily pump a fuckton of gaseous helium into the room, potentially creating overpressure and squeezing the door shut while people suffocate.
Two thousand liters of helium gas were allegedly released as a result of the rifle striking the machine.
No not really. It was release as a result of the same idiot who brought his rifle into the room later pressing the emergency shutdown, thereby quenching the magnet and dumping the helium. What a dumb fuck.
