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> 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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