DRE scandal a disgrace as 29 former officers and employees associated with the program refused to testify, blocking the investigation.
The following document contains files related to the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension’s investigation into allegations that law enforcement officers participating in Drug Recognition Evaluator (DRE) courses provided drugs to sober people they had picked up from Peavey Plaza in downtown Minneapolis where protesters connected with Occupy Minnesota had been located since April 2012. The officers then used the intoxicated subjects for their training course, sometimes providing them with rewards like food or cigarettes, and then returned them to the Plaza.
Though the investigation confirms many aspects of the story and a Sheriff’s Deputy admitted to the DRE course instructor that he had witnessed his partner in the course providing marijuana to subjects, the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension found that there was insufficient evidence to sustain charges and obtain convictions against any of the officers involved. This was partly due to the fact that 29 former officers and employees associated with the program refused to testify, blocking the investigation. For more information on the file, see Dan Feidt’s article on the documents and watch the video report he helped produced in May 2012 which played a significant role in raising public awareness of the issue and spurring the investigation.
The Drug Recognition Evaluator (DRE) course provides important training to law enforcement officers in Minnesota and throughout the country. DRE train officers to accurately identify specific drug impairment and, by observation, the characteristics and behaviors of drug impaired drivers. DRE helps officers detect and apprehend drug impaired drivers who endanger the public.
The classroom training was followed by certification training, which required students to go out into the streets to find people under the influence of drugs and evaluate them. The officer students were then supposed to persuade these individuals to voluntarily accompany them to a Richfield training facility where they would provide a urine sample. This sample would then be tested to determine whether the participant was impaired as the officer had believed, and if so, what drug had been ingested. To encourage cooperation, officers never recorded participants true names.…
In response to these allegations, instructors asked their class whether they had engaged in such conduct or had heard of any classmates doing so. They emphasized that DRE students should not provide potential test participants with controlled substances.
ACISS initial report: http://info.publicintelligence.net/MN-DRE-Investigation.pdf