THE
STOP
THE DRUG DOG
Huffington showed the video of Huff’s
stop to two K-9 experts. Gene Papet is
executive director of K9 Resources, a
company that trains detection dogs, including police dogs. Papet found a number of problems with the way Reichert
handled his dog.
“Just before the dog alerts, you can
hear a change in the tone of the handler’s voice. That’s troubling. I don’t
know anything about this particular
handler, but that’s often an indication
of a handler that’s cuing a response.” In
other words, it’s indicative of a handler
instructing the dog to alert, not waiting
to see whether the dog will alert.
“You also hear the handler say at one
point that the dog alerted from the front of
the car because the wind is blowing from
the back of the car to the front, so the
scent would have carried with the wind,”
Papet says. “But the dog was brought
around the car twice. If that’s the case, the
dog should have alerted the first time he
was brought to the front of the car. The
dog only alerted the second time, which
corresponded to what would be consistent
with a vocal cue from the handler.”
Russ Jones is a former police officer with 10 years in drug enforcement,
including as a K-9 officer. He’s now a
member of Law Enforcement Against
Prohibition, a group of current and former cops and prosecutors who favor
HUFFINGTON
10.21.12
“Law-abiding
citizens have
nothing to
worry about.”
ending the war on drugs. “That dog was
going to do what ever (Officer Reichert)
needed it to do,” Jones says. “Throughout the video, the dog is looking for handler feedback, which isn’t how it’s supposed to work.”
In the 2005 case Illinois v. Caballes,
the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that having
a drug dog sniff the exterior of a vehicle
during a routine traffic stop does not violate the Fourth Amendment. But in a dissent to that opinion, Justice David Souter
pointed to mounting evidence that drug
dogs aren’t as infallible as police departments often claim. Souter noted a study
that the state of Illinois itself used in its
briefs showing that in lab tests, drug dogs
fail 12.5 to 60 percent of the time.
Since then, more evidence has
emerged to support Souter’s concerns.
The problem isn’t that the dogs aren’t
capable of picking up the scent, it’s that
dogs have been bred to please and interact with humans. A dog can easily be manipulated to alert whenever needed. But