Tag: k9

Salt Lake City Suspended Use of Police K9s and Nothing Bad Happened, Study Shows

Cops have long partnered with dogs, claiming they help keep officers safe. But a study published in January suggests that police do just as well without canine colleagues.

In 2020, Salt Lake City suspended the use of police K9 units after The Salt Lake Tribune published body camera footage of an officer ordering his dog to bite a 36-year-old black man who was on his knees with his hands in the air. That abrupt policy shift gave researchers at the University of South Carolina, the University of Utah, and Clemson University a chance to test claims about the benefits of police dogs.

Police say dogs help find hidden suspects, deter resistance, protect officers, intimidate potentially violent crowds, and improve public relations. But the researchers, who reported their findings in the Journal of Experimental Criminology, found that the “sudden suspension of K9 apprehension was not associated with a statistical increase in officer or suspect injury, or suspect resistance, during felony arrests.” The authors concluded that restricting or eliminating police K9s ​is “unlikely to impact aggregate officer or suspect safety negatively.”

Those results contradict widely accepted assumptions. “There is a great conviction within the law enforcement K9 community that these programs provide more effective policing by increasing officer safety, reducing suspect injury, and deterring suspect resistance,” the researchers wrote. “We were not able to detect any such effect on any measure.”

There is ample evidence, however, of what happens when police dogs are misused. In a March report on constitutional violations by police in Louisville, Kentucky, the U.S. Justice Department described several incidents in which officers sicced dogs on compliant or nonthreatening suspects. In one case, an officer searching for a home invasion suspect discovered a 14-year-old boy lying face down on the ground and immediately “deployed his dog off-leash” without “giving any warning.” The officer “ordered the dog to bite the teen at least seven times,” inflicting “serious injuries on his arm and back.”

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The Police Dog Who Cried Drugs at Every Traffic Stop

Don’t blame Karma. The police dog simply followed his training when he helped local agencies impound vehicles that sometimes belonged to innocent motorists in Republic, Washington, an old mining town near the Canadian border.

As a drug detection dog, Karma kept his nose down and treated every suspect the same. Public records show that from the time he arrived in Republic in January 2018 until his handler took a leave of absence to campaign for public office in 2020, Karma gave an “alert” indicating the presence of drugs 100 percent of the time during roadside sniffs outside vehicles.

Whether drivers actually possessed illegal narcotics made no difference. The government gained access to every vehicle that Karma ever sniffed. He essentially created automatic probable cause for searches and seizures, undercutting constitutional guarantees of due process.

Similar patterns abound nationwide, suggesting that Karma’s career was not unusual. Lex, a drug detection dog in Illinois, alerted for narcotics 93 percent of the time during roadside sniffs, but was wrong in more than 40 percent of cases. Sella, a drug detection dog in Florida, gave false alerts 53 percent of the time. Bono, a drug detection dog in Virginia, incorrectly indicated the presence of drugs 74 percent of the time.

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Utah senator says people should ‘stay home’ if they don’t want police dogs to bite them

State lawmakers are looking at codifying best practices for police dog teams after a Salt Lake City audit uncovered a pattern of abuse in the way its law enforcement agency has been using canines to catch suspects.

A legislative committee voted unanimously Tuesday to explore a bill on the issue, although one state senator made clear he has little patience for complaints about police dogs.

“I don’t have a lot of sympathy,” Sen. Don Ipson told his colleagues on the law enforcement and criminal justice committee. “We don’t want to harm the public. But if they don’t want to get bit, stay home.”

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