On June 8, 2011, Officer Olivier walked down the driveway to his pickup truck and noticed that a fishing tackle box loaded with an assortment of illegal drugs was missing. He could find no signs of forced entry and surmised he may have left his truck unlocked.
Why, you might ask, did Officer Olivier have an assortment of illegal drugs in his truck that would make a rock star proud? It seems that Officer Olivier is part of a K-9 unit (his partner, of course, being a dog) and the tackle box contained the samples used to train the dog.
The police report indicates the white tackle box with individual plastic bags of drugs was stolen, including:
- 6.5-grams of cocaine
- 6.6-grams of heroin
- 4.2-grams of methamphetamine
- 6.4-grams of marijuana
- An extra baggie of 30-grams of marijuana
- 3 or 4 prescription pills
To add a further wrinkle to this sordid tale, Officer Olivier told investigators that the drugs were stolen sometime between June 4 (the date he took the drugs out of his patrol car and put them in his truck) and the day he discovered them missing.
The obvious question is why would he put the drugs in his truck in the first place? Wouldn't they have been safer in the trunk of his patrol car? Why did he leave the drugs in his truck for (at least) four days before checking to see they were still there?
Narcotics officers with another police department said the amount of drugs taken is consistent with K-9 training, but the drug-laden training kits are rarely stolen because they are usually carefully guarded and they don't look valuable. They're also usually stored inside a police car, which is a much less likely target for burglars.
I have no idea whether or not Officer Olivier is telling the truth about the fate of the drugs. I find his story to be very amusing. I also find it very hard to believe.
These are the highly trained professionals that prosecutors parade in front of juries to testify as to how our clients consented to a search or that they smelled the "distinctive" odor of (fill-in-the-blank) drug. These are the men and women wearing badges and carrying guns that tell juries the dog really did signal that there were drugs in the car or that the defendant wasn't walking on the sidewalk when he was stopped.
There's something about Officer Olivier's story that just doesn't add up. I'm not going to speculate as to what happened to the drugs or as to whether or not the officer is telling a fib. I will say, however, that, at best, Officer Olivier acted negligently and, at worst, criminally.
Just think about the snickers you'd get if you tried to sell that story to a prosecutor.
H/T Stephen Dean
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