I have a friend who works for our town in the Dept. of Public Works and he just called to tell me this story:
The police were called to the shipping hub / warehouse of a national freight carrier based here in our town to arrest a woman for stealing cell phones that they were shipping. They hauled her into police headquarters and did a body scan with a metal detector, it went off when they scanned her crotch area. There were no policewomen around at the time to do a strip search so they put her in a holding cell. Whoever she is, she’s no fool and proceeded to use the jailhouse toilet to retrieve and flush the evidence. My friend is there now with a jackhammer digging up the cement floor so they can get to the pipes and get the cell phone back to use as evidence. He says no way is he sticking his arm in the pipe, he’ll let his foreman do it.
If you recently ordered a Blackberry and it hasn’t been delivered yet, you might want to check the tracking report.
I think I’ll stick to my land line for now.
That’s kind of weird that they have to dig up the tiles. For some reason I thought the most plumbing was fairly accessible. Guess not.
If I really thought I could retrieve evidence that easily, I’d stick my hand in and go for it. This was obviously too far gone. I wonder why they would not send down a camera to inspect first. They could clearly see what they were looking for and the exact location. It would save on the destruction.
I’ll bet she had the phone set to vibrate. 
Um, some of us may be curious to know (I am): why couldn’t they take an xray before putting her in the cell? Sounds like a load of fucking incompetence to me.
Further, is it illegal to place an officer nearby to listen when she goes to take a piss? Is there any provision to make her piss/shit in a bucket and having someone else dump out the bucket afterward?
AFAIK they just took her to the police station, I think they were waiting for a female cop who was supposed to be there fairly soon; they’d have to take her to the hospital for an xray. They could have put someone nearby when she taking a piss but it may have offended their sensibilities or they really weren’t thinking? Sounds like incompetence to me too.
By the way, I found out that prison toilets are special, all the valves and plumbing are behind the wall, to prevent hangings and using parts as weapons. They were digging throught the floor to some U shaped trap or something.
Why would the police department have an x-ray machine and the expertise to use it? They could have taken her to the nearest hospital, I suppose, but it probably seemed a lot easier to just wait for a female officer to show up. (Personally, I don’t think it should matter who does the search.)
What I want to know is, why don’t they have some filter / trap on toilets and sinks in bathrooms usable by suspects? It seems obvious to me that someone, eventually, will try the ol’ “flush the evidence” trick.
Somehow I thought this was going to end with the cops expecting to find a smuggled cellphone and instead finding a piercing with metal.
Nyuk nyuk!
I have had two people close to me assaulted publicly, both times in an area with camera surveillance. The first in the 90’s in Hawaii at an ATM, the other in the late 2000’s in Copenhagen, Denmark. In both cases the police on the case dropped the ball by not contacting the proper people to retrieve the taped incident. In both cases the tapes had been destroyed due to an understood margin of time expiring.
The first time, in the 90’s, I called the detective on the case periodically to see how things were developing, and was shocked at how things DIDN’T develop.
I guess I’m just saying cops not going through a whole lot (particularly beyond the action hero arrest phase) to get their job done is not exactly a foreign idea to me.
The immigration people have a special john for this, it all goes into a tank. No connection to the drain.
I have to call bullshit on this.