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US IL: Drug-sniffing Dogs In Traffic Stops Often Wrong
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Legal Section Main Page
US IL: Drug-sniffing Dogs In Traffic Stops Often
Wrong!
Legal Section
MICHIGAN
DRIVING MEDICAL POT CASE COULD HIT TOP COURT
MOVE ALONG Driving 101
A cop offers advice on not getting stopped by law enforcement.
10 Ways to Outfox Cops That Are Abusing Their Powers to Trick You
Tribune Analysis:
DRUG-SNIFFING DOGS IN TRAFFIC STOPS OFTEN WRONG
High Number of Fruitless Searches of Hispanics' Vehicles Cited As Evidence of
Bias
Drug-sniffing dogs can give police probable cause to root through cars by the
roadside, but state data show the dogs have been wrong more often than they have
been right about whether vehicles contain drugs or paraphernalia.
The dogs are trained to dig or sit when they smell drugs, which triggers
automobile searches. But a Tribune analysis of three years of data for
suburban departments found that only 44 percent of those alerts by the dogs led
to the discovery of drugs or paraphernalia.
For Hispanic drivers, the success rate was just 27 percent.
Dog-handling officers and trainers argue the canine teams' accuracy shouldn't be
measured in the number of alerts that turn up drugs. They said the scent
of drugs or paraphernalia can linger in a car after drugs are used or sold, and
the dogs' noses are so sensitive they can pick up residue from drugs that can no
longer be found in a car.
But even advocates for the use of drug-sniffing dogs agree with experts who say
many dog-and-officer teams are poorly trained and prone to false alerts that
lead to unjustified searches. Leading a dog around a car too many times or
spending too long examining a vehicle, for example, can cause a dog to give a
signal for drugs where there are none, experts said.
"If you don't train, you can't be confident in your dog," said Alex
Rothacker, a trainer who works with dozens of local drug-sniffing dogs.
"A lot of dogs don't train. A lot of dogs aren't good."
The dog teams are not held to any statutory standard of performance in Illinois
or most other states, experts and dog handlers said, though private groups offer
certification for the canines.
Civil rights advocates and Latino activists say the findings support complaints
that police unfairly target Hispanic drivers for invasive and embarrassing
roadside vehicle searches.
"We know that there is a level of racial profiling going on, and this is
just another indicator of that," said Virginia Martinez, a Chicago-based
staff attorney for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
Adam Schwartz, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union in Illinois,
said the innocent suffer from unjustified searches.
"We've seen a national outcry about being frisked and scanned at
airports," Schwartz said. "The experience of having police take
your car apart for an hour is far more invasive and frightening and
humiliating."
Police insist no racial profiling
The Tribune obtained and analyzed data from 2007 through 2009 collected by the
state Department of Transportation to study racial profiling. But the data
are incomplete. IDOT doesn't offer guidance on what exactly constitutes a
drug dog alert, said spokesman Guy Tridgell, and most departments reported only
a handful of searches based on alerts. At least two huge agencies -- the
Chicago Police Department and Illinois State Police -- reported none.
The Tribune asked both agencies for their data, but state police could not
provide a breakdown of how often their dog alerts led to seizures, and Chicago
police did not provide any data.
That leaves figures only for suburban departments. Among those whose data
are included, just six departments averaged at least 10 alerts per year, with
the top three being the McHenry County sheriff's department, Naperville police
and Romeoville police.
Romeoville did not respond to requests for comment, but Naperville and McHenry
County authorities insisted there was no racial profiling and defended the
performance of their dogs and handlers.
The McHenry County's sheriff's department had the most dog alerts, finding drugs
or paraphernalia in 32 percent of 103 searches. In the eight searches on
Hispanic drivers, officers reported finding drugs just once.
Since September 2008, Deputy Jeremy Bruketta has handled Sage, one of the
McHenry County department's two drug-sniffing German shepherds. Officers
sometimes come up empty-handed in searches of vehicles that clearly once
contained drugs, he said, recalling a traffic stop in which a man, reeking of
pot, had a marijuana stem stuck to his shirt but no drugs were found in the car.
In Naperville, 47 percent of searches turned up drugs or paraphernalia, though
searches on Hispanic drivers turned up drugs in only one of 12 traffic stops,
for a rate of 8 percent.
Officer Eddie Corneliusen, who handles Kairo, one of Naperville's two police
dogs, also cited drug residue and said he's "confident that ( the dog ) is
hitting on the odor of narcotics."
Inconsistent training and standards
Experts and trainers agree that residue could be to blame for some false
positives.
In a cavernous, chilly building at the abandoned former Lake County Fairgrounds,
Rothacker, the trainer, demonstrated the dogs' ability to pinpoint not only
drugs, but also residue.
Rothacker, who works with some 60 area police dogs and handlers at TOPS Kennels
in Grayslake, rubbed a bag of marijuana against a cinder block in the wall.
Two German shepherds he trained alerted on the block with little hesitation,
earning sessions of play with handlers who control the dogs' beloved chew toys.
But Rothacker said false alerts can't be blamed on residue alone.
Rothacker, who trained dogs for both Naperville and McHenry County, said many
trainers use suspect methods and some handlers are "very lazy" about
training their dogs. After initial intensive instruction for dog and
handler, Rothacker offers twice-weekly training to handlers diligent enough to
keep showing up, he said.
"The dogs are only as good as the handlers," he said.
Experts said police agencies are inconsistent about the level of training they
require and few states mandate training or certification. Jim Watson,
secretary of the North American Police Work Dog Association, said a tiny
minority of states require certification, though neither he nor other experts
could say exactly how many.
A federally sponsored advisory commission has recommended a set of best
practices, though they are not backed by any legal mandate.
Illinois state Rep. Jim Durkin, R- Western Springs, sponsored a bill in
2007 that would have created a certification board responsible for setting
standards that all police dogs would have to meet, but the bill died in a Senate
committee after passing in the House. Durkin, a former Cook County
prosecutor who referred to police dogs as "probable cause with four
legs," said he may push the legislation again.
"This one makes sense," he said.
State Rep. Monique Davis wants the drug-dog issue vetted by a state panel
on racial profiling. Davis, D-Chicago, co-sponsored a 2004 law to collect
the police data. Seven years later, she said racial profiling remains a
problem.
"This is the kind of information the commission is supposed to
discuss," she said.
False cues
Civil rights advocates and detector-dog experts said the lack of regulation or
standards has led police to subject innocent drivers to prolonged, humiliating
roadside searches.
The state's data -- in which drivers and officers aren't identified - -- show
that the average false alert led to a stop lasting nearly a half-hour. One
Crystal Lake search led to a three-hour stop for a Hispanic man in 2007.
He was stopped for a license plate/registration violation, according to the
data.
The main check on the competency of a dog-handling officer comes in court, where
a defense lawyer may question a dog's ability to sniff out drugs. But, by
their nature, the stops that don't lead to drug seizures don't get reviewed by a
judge.
The limited court oversight and lack of uniform standards leave vast
discrepancies in the skills of dog-and-officer teams, experts agreed.
Dog handlers can accidentally cue alerts from their dogs by leading them too
slowly or too many times around a vehicle, said Lawrence Myers, an Auburn
University professor who studies detector dogs. Myers pointed to the
"Clever Hans" phenomenon in the early 1900s, named after a horse whose
owner claimed the animal could read and do math before a psychologist determined
the horse was actually responding to his master's unwitting cues.
Training is the key to eliminating accidental cues and false alerts, said Paul
Waggoner of Auburn's detector-dog research program.
"Is there a potential for handlers to cue these dogs to alert?" he
asked. "The answer is a big, resounding yes."
That frustrates Martinez, the attorney from the Mexican American Legal Defense
and Educational Fund.
Dogs do not have the human failings that have led to the targeting of
minorities, but Martinez worries that an officer's bias can translate through
the dog leash. She fears drug-sniffing dogs are another tool to justify
roadside searches of innocent drivers, the unfair consequences of what she
called "driving while Mexican."
"People of color are just targets," she said.
Pubdate: Thu, 06 Jan 2011
Source: Chicago Tribune (IL)
Page: 1
Authors: Dan Hinkel and Joe Mahr
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