LAPD raid goes from bad to farce after gun allegedly sucked onto MRI machine | Hacker News Reader

LAPD raid goes from bad to farce after gun allegedly sucked onto MRI machine

sfgate.com

38 pointscroes37 comments

I really dislike that news media never give references to the actual court docs that they are reporting on. Many times it's truly lazy, just reporting the fact that another news outlet reported on a case.

Noho Diagnostic Center, Inc. v. City of Los Angeles (2:24-cv-07952), District Court, C.D. California

Full complaint: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cacd.94... [pdf]

Docket: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/69172475/noho-diagnosti...

OFFICER FRANCO conducted surveillance on multiple dates in 2023, reporting the "distinct odor of live cannabis plant"..

OFFICER FRANCO compared the power usage of the TARGET PREMISES to nearby businesses and found it significantly higher.

Sounds like Officer Franco may need some retraining.

LAPD has a long track record of baseline incompetence. training will not fix what is wrong here.

At least it tells us that LAPD doesn’t have very precise/high-frequency access to power usage, instead only seeing daily/weekly/monthly averages.

Or maybe they do but are just negligent.

>> At one point, an officer walked into an MRI room, past a sign warning that metal was prohibited inside, with his rifle “dangling… in his right hand, with an unsecured strap,” the lawsuit said. The MRI machine’s magnetic force then allegedly sucked his rifle across the room, pinning it against the machine.

I'd consider it lucky that the rifle didn't discharge. All the safety systems in the world cannot be expected to protect against a random magnetic field doing who knowns what with the internals of a gun while it flies across the room. But this sort of unforeseen situation is why you never walk around with a finger on the trigger.

I'd also consider it very lucky that the rifle wasn't securely strapped in while it was being pulled across the room.

That was my thought as well.

The real farce would have been if were strapped to him and he flew with it like superman. At least he would have been able to get imaging quickly.

He's also lucky the chimney for the boiled helium was working properly. Otherwise he (and perhaps some of his comrades) would be dead from asphyxiation.

The quenching process isn't exactly something they practice.

Unless you are in a closed environment, like a balloon, helium will disapate. Importantly, helium disipates upwards. You pass out, falling to the floor where the incoming air is, but likely will survive.

I want to see a slow motion video of what happens when you fire iron slugs past an MRI machine

Myth Busters missed a good one. Could a bullet do a 180 passed an mri machine.

I don't think Mythbusters had the budget to deal with a possible result of "bullet gets sucked directly into the insanely expensive machinery, destroying it"

I suspect "MRI-strength electromagnet" falls into a different budget category than "medical grade and certified imaging system", including but not limited to "MRI removed from hospital and junked because it's no longer maintained / useful / accurate enough". They are pretty resourceful

Plus the danger of fluid helium escaping within seconds.

You could probably get them to do a 180-degree u-turn

Might be fun to calculate it on paper if I weren't so lazy.

Finally, something that can curve a bullet.

"not allowed" signs are for you citizen losers, not for badass in charge heros.

I cannot believe that the police are allowed to destroy private property and then not pay for it. One particularly egregious example is from Greenwood Village, Colorado[1]. If the destruction of property is necessary to achieve a public good, then the public tax fund should compensate the owners. If it was not necessary, then the individuals who made the incorrect decision to destroy it should be held liable. Under no circumstances should an innocent bystander have their house (or MRI machine) destroyed by the police and then be told that they have to pay for it.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrest_of_Robert_Seacat

I'm sorry, I know this isn't the point... And there's another entirely relevant/important conversation to be had here but...

Do magnets suck? I think magnets pull, but 'suck' to me involves a vacuum.

Also magnets very clearly rock...

If I'm not mistaken there's no such thing as a "sucking" force.

Indeed, sucking implies there is a lack of vacuum somewhere pushing whatever towards a relative vacuum.

its equal to LAPD per square foot

Very stereotypical aggressive police behavior. The “warrior cop” hero syndrome. This is utterly and disgustingly not surprising. From civil forfeiture to qualified immunity, the police have slowly become just as dangerous to innocent citizens as the criminals. No one will lose their job for this. No one will be held responsible. That alone is the worst crime.

That is part of the deterrent factor, even if it does seem excessive. If the police in the U.S. were like the Japanese, Finnish, or French police, it's reasonable to assume crime would go up.

Maybe crime is actually higher because of low trust and general ineptitude and ineffectiveness. The police in many many places in the US have a local reputation of being useless. That can’t be much of a deterrent.

You may think that. But what about the escalation factor instead?

As LEAs have become increasingly militarized, so has their opposition. Look back into the Prohibition era and the weaponry that organized crime needed for their operations. The criminals will only match the opposition in the arms race, and then the LEAs will obtain funding and resources to increase their so-called "deterrent factor", which winds up in catastrophes like Ruby Ridge, Branch Davidians, SWATting, and school shootings.

Perhaps crime doesn't go up in Finland or Japan because the LEAs have not felt the need to militarize and escalate at every turn. (I mean, Japan got their entire military confiscated in 1945, so they should know about escalations!)

Only if they’re competent.

These guys don’t sound competent.

This sounds to me like an attempted asset forfeiture.

The idea that in LA you could get a warrant to raid a business because they use a lot of power and it smells like weed would qualify ALOT of businesses in California for a seizure.

https://archive.ph/1vnOb

those machines are effectively giant magnets. people think they are just tubes of metal.

With so many cops being imbeciles, it makes it impossible for me to respect their "authority" which, absurdly, puts me in danger.

>An officer then allegedly pulled a sealed emergency release button that shut the MRI machine down, deactivating it, evaporating thousands of liters of helium gas and damaging the machine in the process. The officer then grabbed his rifle and left the room, leaving behind a magazine filled with bullets on the office floor, according to the lawsuit.

Idiots with guns and qualified immunity. It wouldn't have been that hard to ask the "lone female employee" for help shutting the machine down safely, but it would have made him feel like less of a badass operator.

> It wouldn't have been that hard to ask the "lone female employee" for help shutting the machine down safely

I believe that takes hours/days.

But it’s not like you can’t see inside the room through several windows.

Hours, perhaps. They can shut the power off and that alone will de-energize the coils without touching the helium. Then it can be turned back on. No damage to the MRI, though the damage to the officer's ego might still be unrecoverable.

Really? I would expect that safely bringing everything back to room temp might take a while, but why would it take a long time to stop the magnets? The whole point of this machine is to rapidly switch the magnetic field on and off, right?

The way I read this, the cop slapped the big red "emergency kill" button that just shut off the power feed to the machine, rather than clicking the button on the HMI that shut down the magnet.

I am not an expert at all though. I've never run an MRI machine. Can anyone who has chime in?

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