Dr. Paige Lemen is a recent PhD graduate in biomedical sciences at the University of Tennessee Health Science Center and co-founder of 901 Harm Reduction, a Memphis-based group providing supplies and resources. She was arrested while transporting a 0.7-gram drug sample for laboratory testing, and now faces a series of charges—including possession with intent to sell, possession of drugs not prescribed, and driving under the influence of a controlled substance. The charges have troubling implications for future harm reduction work.

The arrest occurred on June 3 in Jackson, Tennessee, a small city near Memphis. Minutes earlier, Lemen had picked up the small drug sample for lab testing, something she had routinely done before. She believed at the time that the powdered sample was most likely to contain fentanyl.

Lemen reports that police began tailing her almost immediately after she picked up the sample.

While driving home, she experienced a sudden wave of nausea, a symptom she explained is linked to long-term complications from an Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) infection in 2017. Reaching for a box of crackers she keeps in her car to manage nausea, she briefly drifted over the white line twice.

“It’s very clear they don’t understand anything about drugs—they just immediately see something and then arrest you.”

A Jackson police officer immediately pulled her over for a field sobriety test, which she failed due to her inability to stand on one leg. The police report states that she declined a breathalyzer, urine test and blood draw. But Lemen insists that the brief field sobriety test was the only assessment she was offered prior to her arrest.

Additional officers searched her vehicle without her consent and seized several items linked to her harm reduction outreach and laboratory research, including the drug sample (which the police reported as fentanyl), diluted oxycodone solution for animal studies, rodent-sized syringes and other lab tools, as well as several medications she had been prescribed to manage her EBV complications.

Lemen said she repeatedly explained things to the officers, but that they laughed off her explanation, refusing to take her credentials seriously or ask for any supporting documentation.

“All of my training and credentials are very specific and detailed,” Lemen told Filter, listing off multiple forms of documentation, including from the university and her lab. “It’s very clear they don’t understand anything about drugs—they just immediately see something and then arrest you, and that’s about it.”

Dr. Paige Lemen. Photograph via 901 Harm Reduction/Facebook

According to Lemen, bodycam footage—which was released to her legal team but is not available for public viewing—shows that the police mocked her, celebrating the arrest as if they were “heroes.”

Lemen spent two nights in jail, where she slept on a mattress on the floor as the fifth woman in a four-person cell.

“They’re like, congratulating each other … and talking shit behind my back,” she said. “Like, ‘Look, check her for track marks!’ and stuff.”

Beyond this stigmatizing and unprofessional behavior, additional details raise red flags about potential police misconduct. When pulled over, Lemen openly acknowledged taking promethazine, a prescribed anti-nausea medication that is not a controlled substance. The officer insisted that constituted “driving on a controlled substance” and recorded it as such in his report. This is one of the three charges that Lemen is now facing in court.

The police report also claimed that one vial of her laboratory-grade diluted oxycodone solution tested positive for cocaine, a substance Lemen said she has never handled in her research or personal life. She questioned the accuracy of the field test, noting their known unreliability and the lack of a subsequent confirmatory analysis.

The Jackson Police Department did not respond to Filter’s request for comment on the accuracy of Dr. Lemen’s account.

“The entire rest of June, beginning of July, nobody was able to get supplies from us … People didn’t feel comfortable ‘cause there were police surrounding us … very clearly surveilling us.”

Lemen spent two nights in jail, where she slept on a mattress on the floor as the fifth woman in a four-person cell. Nurses refused to provide her the medications needed to manage her chronic illness. She was released on the evening of June 5 after a local harm reduction organization, DeCarcerate Memphis, paid her $10,000 bond.

Despite the personal costs of her arrest, Lemen is most concerned about its effects on her community. Heightened police surveillance at events has inhibited 901 Harm Reduction’s outreach work, she said, and several clients have reported being harassed by the police about whether Lemen had “sold them drugs.”

“The entire rest of June, beginning of July, nobody was able to get supplies from us at all,” she said. “People didn’t feel comfortable coming up ‘cause there were constantly security and police surrounding us … very clearly surveilling us.”

Photograph via 901 Harm Reduction/Facebook

Lemen said she has also observed unmarked police cars regularly parking near her home and taking photos of her property since her arrest.

In addition to the impacts on the immediate community, the case will likely set a precedent for how judges in Tennessee, and possibly far beyond, deal with future cases involving drug checking.

“Drug checking has those really gray-area laws, similar to syringe service programs,” Lemen explained. Even where it’s legal to operate registered drug checking programs, “There’s still those gray areas … What about the people working there bringing supplies in their car, and what happens if they get pulled over while they’re on the way?”

In advance of her court hearing, Lemen plans to continue gathering documentation that will prove her authorization to possess the confiscated supplies.

These legal gray areas worry harm reduction practitioners, who have consistently advocated for policy reforms that explicitly permit drug checking, syringe programs, naloxone distribution and other harm reduction interventions. Lemen’s arrest suggests that their fears are well-founded, and she’s acutely aware of the importance of her case.

“That’s gonna make me, like, probably the first person in Tennessee to get charged with drug checking,” she said. “If the only case to go off of is my case … that means they’re probably just gonna revert to my case outcome.”

In advance of her September 16 court hearing, Lemen plans to continue gathering documentation that will prove her authorization to possess the confiscated supplies. She is also searching for legal allies who understand laboratory research and drug checking and can articulate their legality to the judge.

She hopes that her case can make a positive impact, but she worries that even with the appropriate documentation, the judge will be unwilling to hear her perspective.

“People just don’t understand anything and aren’t willing to try,” she said.

Top photograph via Pickpik

The post Tennessee Harm Reductionist Faces Charges for Drug Checking appeared first on Filter.

The state-funded Police Records Access Project was created by the California Reporting Project, a team spearheaded by journalists and data scientists from Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley. The database was jointly published August 4 by CalMatters, KQED, the San Francisco Chronicle and the Los Angeles Times.

In 2018 California passed the Right to Know Act, which made certain types of police records subject to disclosure via public records requests. Though groundbreaking, it was limited to misconduct cases involving shootings, sexual assault or dishonesty that interfered with investigations. In 2021 the state passed legislation that made additional types of records subject to disclosure, including those related to excessive force, unlawful searches and engaging in prejudice or discrimination. But now, the public can use the new database to search hundreds of departments across the state at once.

All records were originally released by law enforcement departments after being redacted to protect the release of personal information or graphic imagery. The database does not include audio or video records.

“Law enforcement hiring officials are very interested,” California Reporting Project Director of Research Lisa Pickoff-White told Filter. “They’ll be able to search records about officers in ways they have not been able to do before.”

Pickoff-White and colleagues began filing records requests January 1, 2019. Since then, they’ve collectively sent more than 3,500 requests, and published hundreds of stories based on the records they obtained.

“We always knew we wanted to publish the underlying documents as well, but that was really difficult,” she said. “Before [2019], some agencies actually started destroying records. We had to sue in other places to produce these records. Getting them has been a huge amount of work.”

If the agency does send the requested records, they might send them a few files at a time. The team organized tens of thousands of files for the public to be able to make sense of the cases they came from.

Statewide, many cases show inaction by police agencies to investigate deaths at the hands of one of their own.

“[There are many] people who would benefit from this,” Susan E. Seager, who worked on the database and also leads the Press Freedom Project at the University of California, Irvine School of Law, told Filter. “Family members of someone who was shot and killed or severely injured by a police officer, they can now look up the interview of the officer [to see] if they were disciplined … reporters can look up if an officer is involved in a shooting, they can see if they were involved in other shootings and what happened. Criminal defense lawyers and prosecutors can use this—they should know if that officer worked for another agency prior to where the prosecutor is using them as a witness, and see if they were fired for dishonesty.”

Statewide, many cases show inaction by police agencies to investigate deaths at the hands of one of their own.

KQED sued the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to compel release of records. The Chronicle uncovered a practice wherein officers who’d received misconduct complaints could sign an agreement to erase their record in exchange for their resigning—so they could go on working at a different department. 

Pickoff-White and colleagues have sued the San Joaquin County coroner over costs of death investigations. And they uncovered records of 73 police dog bites in the city of Richmond, in which some of the victims were children. They’re now part of a push to include dog bites under the legal definition of great bodily injury.

“These are the kind of pushes we will continue to make,” she said. “[The work] is ongoing.”

Image (cropped) via City of Olympia, Washington

The post First Public Database of CA Police Officer Misconduct Records Unveiled appeared first on Filter.

HB 317 will be the first bill up for consideration by the Judiciary committee on April 17. Similar legislation has been moving through the Senate. If enacted, it would take effect July 1.

According to the Florida Phoenix, the bill has divided local law enforcement. While rank-and-file cops are in favor, many in leadership positions—backed by the Florida Sheriffs Association and the Florida Police Chiefs Association, both prominent lobbying groups—are opposed.

The Phoenix reported that at an April 10 hearing, Jennifer “Cookie” Pritt, executive director of the Florida Police Chiefs Association, gave a powerful testimony recounting how early in her career she had been discouraged from reporting a senior officer who had sexually assaulted her. Several lawmakers in attendance who were initially in favor of the bill reportedly changed their minds after Pritt’s testimony. Nonetheless, the bill was advanced by a vote of 11 to 6.

“There’s a game out there. When correction officers are doing a good job you make a bunch of complaints against them,” James Baiardi, president of the Corrections Chapter of the Florida Police Benevolent Association, said at the hearing according to the Phoenix. “If you want to make a complaint against somebody, and if you’re not lying to me, you don’t have a problem putting your name on it.”

One the bill’s other provisions would prevent any record of an investigation from being included in an officer’s file unless that investigation had resulted in disciplinary action.

Most departments usually approach all complaints the same way regardless of whether they were made anonymously;

A regional Florida guide to police misconduct complaints suggests that departments usually allow them to be filed in person as well as by mail, email, phone or fax, and that they approach each complaint the same way regardless of whether it was made anonymously. Several departments have stated this explicitly, on their complaint forms or on their websites.

However, the North Miami Police Department online complaint forms require identification fields filled out in order to submit them, while the North Miami Beach Police Department states on its website that “it is difficult to conduct an investigation and make a determination based on anonymous information, due to a lack of complete information and victim / witness cooperation.” The Florida International University Police Department states that “[t]he chief of police has the discretion on whether to investigate an anonymous complaint.”

Another bill currently being reviewed in the Florida Senate, SB 1266, would establish that “certain records identifying law enforcement officers who are involved in a use of force incident are confidential and exempt” from public records requests for a minimum of 72 hours. After that, however, the head of the department has the discretion to extend the exemption indefinitely.

Meanwhile, the Department of Justice has put a nationwide freeze on civil rights litigation, and taken down the only database tracking federal officer misconduct. According to the Appeal, 70 percent of complaints in that database filed between 2017 and 2024 involved officers from the Bureau of Prisons or from Customs and Border Protection. 

Image (cropped) via Miami-Dade County

The post Florida May Soon Ban Anonymous Officer Misconduct Complaints appeared first on Filter.