Why were the Police Still Following an Outdated Law?

 I wonder if I was too easy on Officer Jeff Payne in my blog this morning.
 "I do feel we should have a little more compassion for Officer Payne," I wrote. "I don't know if his job can be saved. I don't know but what criminal charges shouldn't be filed against him. I do wonder, though, that after what he has learned, it might well be he will not make the mistake again. He might well be a good officer, despite this."
  Tonight, I read the Washington Post story. It quoted Payne's comments picked up by the body cam. They had been inaudible when I listened to the video, but the Post writer picked them out.
  "So why don't we just write a search warrant?" a fellow officer asks Payne.
  "They don't have PC," Payne replies, referring to the Logan Police Department's not having the probable cause necessary for a search warrant.
   That indicates Payne should have known it was wrong -- illegal -- to collect the blood. If you know you need probable cause to get a search warrant, and you know you don't have it, and you are pressing forward to get it anyway, where does that leave you?
  Plus, the nurse, Alex Wubbels, did read Payne the requirements for a blood draw. When she read the rules, it should have registered on him that what he was doing just might be illegal. Did he think that even without probable cause, the sample could be collected legally under implied consent? If he did, why did he not verbalize as much at that point?
  Instead, after Wubbels explains how the requirements for a legal blood drive have not been met, Payne says, "So, I take it that without those in place, I'm not going to get blood." Those words indicate he had digested what she had told him, yet he was determined to act, anyway. He then moves toward her as she backs away, trying to swat the cell phone out of her hand that she had him listening to as her supervisor warned him that what he was doing was wrong.
  Payne is a trained police phlebotomist. He was not there to collect a blood draw done by one of the hospital workers, he was there to do the blood draw himself. One wonders why the need for that. Why not just let the hospital workers do the blood draws, and hand them over to the police? Was there a point when that was the practice, then the police started sending in their own people to do the draws?
   The Utah law on implied consent changed a decade ago. In addition, a 2016 U.S. Supreme Court ruling declared blood tests without warrants illegal. How does the police agency, then, continue to operate under the presumption that implied consent is still the rule -- a decade later? How did the Supreme Court ruling never catch up with the SLCPD?
   It becomes fair to wonder if the police were not continuing the practice blood draws despite what they had been told. This scenario seems even more likely when you consider that Payne blew off Wubbels' explanation as to why she could not permit the blood draw, as if the news was not news to him and he was going to do the blood draw, anyway.
   One wonders. The police might, indeed, have been operating under the mistaken presumption that what they were doing was legal. But, if so, how? If nothing else, there should be an investigation into why they were so belatedly following bad policy.