Source: http://rexcurry.net/drugdogsframe.html
Timestamp: 2019-04-24 09:07:49+00:00

Document:
NARCO DOGS ARE USED TO FRAME PEOPLE AND TO PLANT DRUGS ?
Francis Bellamy & Edward Bellamy touted National Socialism and the police state in the USA decades before their dogma was exported to Germany.
DRUG DOGS USED TO PLANT DRUGS?
Note that in one of the articles on the cited web page the government's department claims that the outrageous practice is widespread around the nation. Please alert everyone. Send info to this website of any other jurisdictions that use such "training" methods. Also note that the 3 gram amounts just happen to be the cutoff levels for the stiffer trafficking charge in that jurisdiction.
Another case raises the question whether police steal cocaine that is in evidence and then leave talcum powder in place of the stolen cocaine? Some sniffer dogs were mis-trained to detect cocaine that was borrowed from the evidence room, until someone discovered that the "cocaine" was talcum powder.
In another case, Florida cops [*sniff*] "lost" a two-gram packet [*sniff*] of blow used for [*sniff*] training police dogs in a hotel room.
Las Vegas police officers this week will end a long-standing police dog-training practice of placing narcotics inside the vehicles of law-abiding motorists.
For nearly 13 years, Las Vegas officers who work with drug-sniffing dogs had placed police-confiscated narcotics in people's vehicles to test their dogs' ability to sniff out hidden drugs.
The training exercise is common in police agencies nationwide.
A dog is often dispatched to a traffic stop if an officer suspects there are narcotics in a vehicle.
During a true drug search, or after a search is completed, the canine officer would place bags of heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine or marijuana in the vehicle as part of the staged exercise.
In response to a recent incident in which a man was incorrectly charged with a crime, the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada has said the training procedure is inappropriate, and Sheriff Bill Young said last week that the practice will be temporarily terminated.
But canine officers in Las Vegas and police-dog experts insist the training is essential. They say stopping it could put the department at risk if ill-equipped dogs alert on scents other than narcotics.
"We want to expose our dogs to as many different environments as possible," said Las Vegas canine officer Jim Seebock. "We're asking our dogs to go find drugs in filthy conditions, so, if we trained them in a clean environment, then we wouldn't know if they would perform."
The officers acknowledged that not many in the public know they routinely placed illegal drugs in the vehicles of law-abiding citizens.
The training exercise came to light recently after a canine officer forgot to retrieve cocaine from the vehicle of a man who was later charged with drug possession after other investigators found the forgotten drugs in his car.
The motorist, Mark Lilly, was arrested at the scene after he tried to sell fake drugs to an undercover officer. His car was searched after he had been arrested for violating a law that forbids selling fake drugs.
With assistance from the ACLU, Lilly filed a lawsuit against the police department earlier this month. The lawsuit claims he was falsely charged with drug possession.
The lawsuit, which seeks damages in excess of $10,000, also claims the arresting officers violated Lilly's constitutional rights and that the department has a history of inadequately investigating wrongdoing by officers.
Allen Lichtenstein, counsel for the ACLU, said involving citizens' vehicles in dog training sets the stage for police abuse and devastating mistakes like the one that occurred in Lilly's case.
"It's a bad practice. It should cease immediately," Lichtenstein said. "A good rule of thumb is that police should not put drugs in the cars or other property of civilians. There is a potential for all kinds of problems, and it is unnecessary."
The lawsuit came after members of the police department's Citizen Review Board recommended that canine officer David Newton be suspended without pay and that other officers involved in Lilly's arrest be terminated.
Andrea Beckman, director of the Review Board, said last week that board members who reviewed the case are very concerned about the training method.
"The feeling of the board is that there is a grave concern where training exercises are being done during a live investigation," Beckman said. "There is the risk of a mistake. There is the problem of Mr. Lilly potentially driving off with the Metro (police) drugs in the back of his car."
Similar problems haven't surfaced during the past 13 years. But after the Lilly case, Young said he determined that the dangers of the exercise outweigh its benefits.
"Because an officer failed to retrieve a training aid, we have had two other officers accused of making a false arrest. We have people questioning our integrity, and a lot of people question the value, or the need, to place illegal narcotics in a vehicle when we are dealing with a criminal suspect," Young said. "It's a matter of best practices. Could we have avoided all of this by changing a training practice?"
The officers assigned to the canine unit's six drug-sniffing dogs carry heroine, cocaine, methamphetamine and marijuana with them on patrol.
Each officer carries a four-gram, 14-gram and 28-gram bag of each drug for use in training. Each drug is kept inside a mason jar, and all of the jars are secured inside a locker in the officer's SUV.
The 14 officers and two sergeants in the canine unit each ride with a patrol dog, either a German shepherd or Belgian malinois. Six of the officers also are accompanied by a drug-sniffing canine, which are hunting breeds like Labradors, malinois and springer spaniels.
The narcotics, which are confiscated from suspects in drug cases, are monitored regularly by the officers' superiors and the police crime lab, the officers said.
A supervisor weighs each officer's narcotics monthly to make certain the weight hasn't changed, and the purity or quality of each drug is tested by lab technicians once a year, Sgt. Jay Carlson said.
"We do a lot to make sure our training aids are accounted for," said Carlson, who has been with the canine unit since 1992. "There is no way I can take out my cocaine and replace it. I will get caught."
As a result of the controversy surrounding Lilly's arrest, police started labeling the bag as property of the department. The notice includes the officer's name and phone number in case the training tool is misplaced.
Lt. Kent Bitsko, who oversees the canine unit, said the Lilly incident was a mistake and that better controls are in place as a result, but that similar problems still could arise in the future. Nobody is perfect, he said.
"Our controls are better now than they have ever been, and four years from now they will be even better," Bitsko said. "The shame of it is that it takes something bad to happen to bring it to our attention."
Terry Fleck, deputy sheriff for the Eldorado County sheriff's office in Northern California and a member of the United States Police Canine Association, has trained police dogs all over the country for years.
He said Las Vegas' canine unit is considered one of the best.
Fleck said that training canines during traffic stops is an essential aspect of any good police-dog program. Dogs won't respond appropriately if they are trained, for example, to search officers' private vehicles, cars in a junkyard or some other staged, controlled setting.
To do their job well, the dogs must be able to distinguish the scents of illegal narcotics from myriad odors, such as beer cans, motor oil, perfume and groceries.
And the dogs must learn to locate drugs despite real-life distractions, such as the noise of traffic and strangers looking on.
"It's like night and day," Fleck said of dogs who receive training during traffic stops and those who don't. "If he is distracted by the cars whizzing by or the people or the McDonald's wrapper or whatever is in the car, without the acclimation training, they are going to be distracted just like you would be."
Bob Eden, a canine officer in Delta, British Columbia, who founded the Eden Consulting Group, which trains police dogs for other agencies, said dogs are smart enough to distinguish a rehearsed training exercise from a drug search simulated under real-life circumstances.
If the dogs don't receive in-the-field training, the dog might get lazy and become unreliable when it comes time to find real drugs, he said.
"To get more acclimated to the real-life situation, we want to get them out and give them as much variety as possible so they're acclimated to real world noises, scents and distractions," Eden said.
"If the dog's capability is lowered due to a lack of training, you might end up with a false indication. We want that dog to not give a false indication, and the only way to do that is to make sure the dog is comfortable in any environment."
COPS PLANT POT ? FLWeekly V 29 # 25 June 19 2004 - the attempted murder retrial Andrews 4th DCA D1328 shows the judge finds that cops intended to kill Andrews before he was stopped, & planted pot in car.
Cops steal cocaine and leave talcum powder? Are they looking for a thief? Maybe. Did villains get away with it? Maybe. Should you be concerned about police?
POLICE have described the substitution of talcum powder for cocaine in the training of Victorian sniffer dogs as an "embarrassing administrative bungle".
However, despite downplaying yesterday's revelations in The Australian, Assistant Commissioner Paul Evans could not rule out police corruption after confirming three separate inquiries were under way.
Mr Evans admitted seven of the state's elite drug sniffer dogs had to be retrained after spending more than five months on Melbourne's streets unable to track cocaine because they were mistakenly trained to detect the drug with talcum powder.
He said initial investigation had indicated the talcum powder may have been mislabelled as cocaine by police, but conceded that there may be a more sinister explanation.
"This is an embarrassing incident ... That's why we are having a full investigation. We need to drill down and find out what's going on," Mr Evans said.
Police discovered they were using talcum powder to train the dogs to detect cocaine during an internal audit, Mr Evans said.
"The good news is this has been picked up early by our internal processes. We also expect to be able to quickly track down any lost babies."
Mr Evans said police had not charged anyone with the possession of misidentified talcum powder, but conceded it was possible the dogs had failed to detect the presence of cocaine on suspects.
There have long been rumors that police canine officers carry around small quantities of contraband drugs which they can use to contaminate a motorist's car, causing their dogs to "alert" on the vehicle and thus justifying an otherwise illegal search of the interior and its occupants.
Many have dismissed such stories as an urban legend.
But what would happen if a group of Las Vegas Metropolitan police officers were actually found to have participated in such an activity? Would all be forgiven with a wrist-slap, if they merely said it was "a mistake"?
While officers were in the process of arresting local resident Mark Lilly last July on suspicion of selling harmless legal substances and claiming they were narcotics, an official police spokesman now admits, canine officer David Newton placed real controlled drugs in Mr. Lilly's vehicle. He has since contended he did so "as a training exercise" for his dog.
It seems pointless to ask whether contaminating active crime scenes is an accepted time, method, or location for a canine "training exercise." A better question might be what Officer Newton was doing carrying narcotics to an active crime scene in the first place. Has he been charged with possession of those narcotics? Were they of a quantity that would get anyone else automatically charged with "possession with intent to sell"?
Police next expect us to believe officer Newton "forgot" he had placed the drugs in the car, whereupon officers Kevin Collmar and David Parker searched the car, found the planted drugs, and charged Mr. Lilly with possession of actual controlled drugs without proper licenses or prescriptions.
To his credit, canine officer Newton subsequently filled out a notice to the prosecutor that he himself had possessed and planted the drugs, and that the charge should be dropped.
But that notice somehow "never made it to the prosecutor," contends Las Vegas Police Deputy Chief Mike Ault, who oversees internal investigations.
Officers Parker and Collmar then proceeded to testify against Mr. Lilly at his preliminary hearing, failing to mention to the prosecutor (or the court, presumably) that the possession charge should have been dropped since the drugs had been planted by police.
Mr. Lilly was ordered to stand trial in District Court. This generally entails considerable expense and inconvenience. Charges were not dropped until officer Jeffrey Huyer notified the prosecution.
Internal Affairs investigators concluded Parker and Collmar "neglected their duty" -- an awfully polite way to put it.
On Feb. 17, the often toothless Las Vegas Police Citizen Review Board found some backbone, recommending these officers be fired because they had filed a false report and lied in court.
But apparently those aren't firing offenses in the department of Sheriff Bill Young. Instead, Sheriff Young said Thursday he will suspend these two officers without pay, since the drugs were not placed in Mr. Lilly's vehicle "intentionally."
Is the sheriff now contending the drugs fell out of officer Newton's pocket accidentally? That he was actually planning to distribute them at a retirement party down at the precinct house later that night? Then what was all that hoo-hah about "conducting a training exercise"? And -- again -- what possible legitimate purpose could a canine officer have for carrying his own narcotics to a live crime scene?
Did we just forget to take our "dumb" pills today?
Joining in this bizarre defense of such police behavior, Las Vegas Police Protective Association President Dave Kallas opines "I am at least glad that the department realized the Citizen Review Board recommendation was extreme and certainly not reasonable."
Mr. Lilly, whose car was auctioned off after it was impounded, insists "It was no mistake. They knew what they were doing. It was a setup."
Sheriff Young's wrist-slap punishment "raises serious questions about the integrity of the entire criminal justice system in Southern Nevada," says Gary Peck, executive director of the ACLU of Nevada.
How many other drug busts have officer Newton and his trained pooch helped facilitate? How many have served time after one of these little "training exercises"? How large a stash of contraband drugs does the officer possess, where did he get it, and what's it for? How much will taxpayers end up paying to settle the promised lawsuit from the falsely accused Mr. Lilly?
Sheriff Young and his investigators apparently don't care. Case closed.
In another case, Florida cops [*sniff*] "lost" a two-gram packet [*sniff*] of blow used for [*sniff*] training police dogs. An associated press article on October 21, 2009 and datelined Naples, Fla said that police in Naples are on the lookout for cocaine. Somehow, they lost their stash. A 2-gram packet was discovered missing this summer from a narcotics kit used in training. Two officers lost it in April, but they're unsure where. It could've been the police parking lot or an airport rental car, but the likely spot was a hotel.
The veteran pair checked out the kit to train their police dogs, but the one who usually handles the drugs was called to a scene. By the time she returned, the dogs were energetic and destroying the room.
The officers said they were focusing more on straightening up the hotel room than collecting the drugs, so the bag probably got left.
They weren't reprimanded — supervisors say it was an honest mistake.
DO TSA THUGS FRAME PEOPLE? Many airport employees double as paid informers for the police. The Drug Enforcement Administration usually pays them 10 percent of any money seized, says Capt. Judy Bawcum, head of the Nashville police division that runs an airport unit. It is an incentive for lies and frame-ups.
Someone wrote: I wonder how many times that similar 'jokes' have been perpetrated on the flying public?
exist in a vacuum, people. They exist because their victims-to-be LET them exist.
Gardai phoned the man who had explosives planted on his backpack by Slovak authorities twice before breaking down his door.
Electrician Stefan Gonda has spoken for the first time about the ordeal and says he was traumatised by the actions of the gardai.
The 49-year-old father has been assured that compensation is forthcoming -- from his government, not the Irish State.
And he says he has also received an apology from gardai for the tactics that saw Army bomb experts storm his apartment in a joint operation with gardai at Dorset Street, in Dublin.
In a statement issued to a Slovak news agency, Mr Gonda explained his unintentional involvement in this month's bomb fiasco. He outlined how he discovered the dangerous substance RDX which was planted by Slovak border police as part of a training exercise to test sniffer dogs.
Marijuana presents its own problems for dogs since its very pungent smell is long-lasting. Trainers have testified that drug dogs can react to clothing containers or cars months after marijuana has been removed. A 1989 case in Richmond, Va., addressed the issue of how reliable dogs are in marijuana searches. Jack Adams, a special agent with the Virginia State Police, supervised training of drug dogs for the state. He said the odor from a single suitcase filled with marijuana and placed with 100 other bags in a closed Amtrak baggage car in Miami could permeate all the other bags in the car by the time the train reached Richmond. And what happens to the mountain of "drug-contaminated" dollars the government seized each year ? The bills aren't burned, cleaned, or stored in a well-guarded warehouse. Twenty-one seizing agencies questioned all said that tainted money was deposited in a local bank - which means it's back in circulation.
Sheriff Bill Young said Thursday he will suspend without pay two officers involved in the arrest of a man charged with drug possession after a canine officer placed the narcotics in the man's car as an exercise for his drug-sniffing dog.
The decision to suspend officers Kevin Collmar and David Parker came a month after the Las Vegas police Citizen Review Board recommended that the officers be fired.
Board members concluded the officers filed a false report and that they lied in court. "They make good officers look bad," according to the board's Feb. 17 findings.
Young said the unpaid suspensions were appropriate, in part because the drugs were not placed in suspect Mark Lilly's vehicle intentionally.
"We did a thorough investigation on this. A couple officers made some errors, but there was nothing done by the police officers to cause further harm," Young said.
Police said Lilly offered to sell narcotics to an undercover officer in Las Vegas in July. A search of his vehicle and found fake drugs, police said. Lilly was charged with violating a law that forbids selling bogus narcotics, said Deputy Chief Mike Ault, who oversees internal investigations.
But canine officer David Newton then placed real drugs in Lilly's vehicle as a training exercise for his dog. The officer forgot the drugs, and Lilly was charged with drug possession after other officers searched his vehicle.
Newton soon discovered the mistake and filled out a notice to a prosecutor so the possession charge would be dropped. But the notice never made it to the prosecutor, Ault said.
Parker and Collmar then testified at Lilly's preliminary hearing and failed to mention to the prosecutor that the possession charge should have been dropped, Ault said.
A judge then ordered Lilly to stand trial in District Court. The possession charge wasn't dropped until officer Jeffrey Guyer notified the prosecutor after the preliminary hearing.
A disciplinary letter was put in Newton's personnel file for his actions after the arrest.
Internal-affairs investigators determined Parker and Collmar neglected their duty and that Parker didn't prepare for court as required.
Young declined to say how long the suspensions will last. Both can appeal the punishments. If they are successful, the officers could be suspended for fewer days or not disciplined at all.
Dave Kallas, president of the Las Vegas Police Protective Association and a Review Board critic, declined to comment on the suspensions without knowing the duration of each. But he applauded the sheriff for not following the Review Board's advice.
"I am at least glad that the department realized the Citizen Review Board recommendation was extreme and certainly not reasonable," Kallas said.
Lilly, who said his car was auctioned off by the Police Department after it was impounded, said the officers should be terminated and arrested for intentionally planting drugs in his car.
"It was no mistake. They knew what they were doing. It was a setup. If it was anybody else, they would have been prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law," Lilly said. "They don't cut any corners for criminals. Why should they for cops?"
Illinois v. Caballes, 03-923 Supreme Court to Rule on Drug Dogs in Traffic Stops WASHINGTON, April 5 2004. Audio recordings of the oral arguments in Caballes can be heard or downloaded at http://www.oyez.org/oyez/resource/case/1751/ The reading of the opinion can also be heard at that url. When Roy Caballes was pulled over by an Illinois state trooper for speeding on a rainy night in 1998, the incident did not seem to be grist for a Supreme Court case. But as Mr. Caballes's car was sitting beside Interstate 80 in La Salle County, another trooper arrived with a police dog. The dog sniffed around it for the presence of drugs, and marijuana was found in the trunk. Mr. Caballes was given only a warning for speeding (he had been clocked at 71 miles an hour in a 65 m.p.h. zone), but he was in big trouble because of the marijuana, since he had prior drug-related arrests. The 1998 arrest resulted in a conviction on marijuana-trafficking charges, a sentence of 12 years in prison and a fine of more than $250,000. Mr. Caballes appealed, contending that the trial court should have suppressed the evidence of the drugs found in the trunk and thrown out the arrest because the police had improperly widened the bounds of an ordinary traffic stop. An Illinois appeals court rejected Mr. Caballes's argument, finding that the sniff by the dog was justified. But the Illinois Supreme Court sided with the defendant, ruling 4 to 3 that the sniff was conducted without "specific and articulable facts" and throwing out the conviction. The Illinois justices said the fact that the aroma of air-freshener was obvious in the defendant's car and his apparent nervousness even after being told he was being given only a warning for speeding could account for "nothing more than a vague hunch" on the part of the troopers, not a sufficient basis to let the dog sniff. (One fact not explained in any of the legal paperwork is why Mr. Caballes was pulled over in the first place, since he was going a mere 6 m.p.h. over the limit.) In any event, the Illinois attorney general, Lisa Madigan, has appealed the Illinois Supreme Court ruling. So within the next several months, the United States Supreme Court will rule on Mr. Caballes's fate, and perhaps clarify when a sniff is a search, and when it is just a sniff. It is yet another in a series of cases weighing police officers' power to look for wrongdoing against the Constitution's Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.
In a Michigan case from more than a decade ago, the justices upheld sobriety checkpoints as a means of protecting public safety by getting drunken drivers off the road. The Supreme Court has also ruled that a sniff by a drug-detecting dog, which is commonly used at airports, is so minimally intrusive as not to constitute a search.
But in a 2000 case from Indianapolis, the justices ruled that roadblocks aimed at discovering drugs violate the Fourth Amendment. The majority held that "the generalized and ever-present possibility that interrogation and inspection may reveal that any given motorist has committed some crime" was insufficient justification for wholesale stops.
US v. Robinson 6th Circuit (argued Oct 2003) Whether an "ancient" sniff trained dog is sufficient for probable cause that marijuana is present at the time of the sniff is an issue. A significant issue remains as to whether the dog is trained to quantitative amounts or to historic presence, i.e. that marijuana has been present sometime in the past but may not be there at the time of the sniff.
Kyllo v. United States, 533 U.S. 27 (2001), Docket Number: 99-8508 audio is at http://www.oyez.org/oyez/resource/case/1304/ A Department of the Interior agent, suspicious that Danny Kyllo was growing marijuana, used a thermal-imaging device to scan his triplex. The imaging was to be used to determine if the amount of heat emanating from the home was consistent with the high-intensity lamps typically used for indoor marijuana growth. Subsequently, the imaging revealed that relatively hot areas existed, compared to the rest of the home. Based on informants, utility bills, and the thermal imaging, a federal magistrate judge issued a warrant to search Kyllo's home. The search unveiled growing marijuana. After Kyllo was indicted on a federal drug charge, he unsuccessfully moved to suppress the evidence seized from his home and then entered a conditional guilty plea. Ultimately affirming, the Court of Appeals held that Kyllo had shown no subjective expectation of privacy because he had made no attempt to conceal the heat escaping from his home, and even if he had, there was no objectively reasonable expectation of privacy because the imager "did not expose any intimate details of Kyllo's life," only "amorphous 'hot spots' on the roof and exterior wall." Question Presented: Does the use of a thermal-imaging device to detect relative amounts of heat emanating from a private home constitute an unconstitutional search in violation of the Fourth Amendment? Conclusion: Yes. In a 5-4 opinion delivered by Justice Antonin Scalia, the Court held that "[w]here, as here, the Government uses a device that is not in general public use, to explore details of the home that would previously have been unknowable without physical intrusion, the surveillance is a 'search' and is presumptively unreasonable without a warrant." In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens argued that the "observations were made with a fairly primitive thermal imager that gathered data exposed on the outside of [Kyllo's] home but did not invade any constitutionally protected interest in privacy," and were, thus, "information in the public domain."
It struck down a city police policy requiring everyone attending a November 2002 protest against the "School of the Americas" to pass through a metal detector violated the Fourth and First Amendments.
The City's brief begins with the bold declaration that "[l]ocal governments need an opinion that, without question, allows non-discriminatory, low-level magnetometer searches at large gatherings." Appellees' Brief at 13. Citing nothing more than a single case from 1980, the City contends that "[p]ost September 11, 2001, this Court can determine [that] the preventive measure of a magnetometer at large gatherings is constitutional as a matter of law." Id. (citing Donovan v. Dewey, 452 U.S. 594, 606 (1980)).
This argument is troubling. While the threat of terrorism is omnipresent, we cannot use it as the basis for restricting the scope of the Fourth Amendment's protections in any large gathering of people. In the absence of some reason to believe that international terrorists would target or infiltrate this protest, there is no basis for using September 11 as an excuse for searching the protestors.
Even putting aside the City's ill-advised and groundless reference to September 11, its demand for the unbridled power to perform "magnetometer searches at [all] large gatherings" is untenable. The text of the Fourth Amendment contains no exception for large gatherings of people. . . .
A great case, it is also perplexing for another reason: It cites Wikipedia, an anonymous bulletin board (touted as an online collaborative encyclopedia), for information on the Department of Homeland Security Advisory System. It might be one of only two times that a court has cited Wikipedia, the other being Bryant v. Oakpointe Villa Nursing Ctr., 471 Mich. 411 (2004), a Michigan Supreme Court case, which cites Wikipedia for information on positional asphyxia.
Katz v. United States 389 U.S. 347 (1967) Decided December 18, 1967: Acting on a suspicion that Katz was transmitting gambling information over the phone to clients in other states, Federal agents attached an eavesdropping device to the outside of a public phone booth used by Katz. Based on recordings of his end of the conversations, Katz was convicted under an eight-count indictment for the illegal transmission of wagering information from Los Angeles to Boston and Miami. On appeal, Katz challanged his conviction arguing that the recordings could not be used as evidence against him. The Court of Appeals rejected this point, noting the absence of a physical intrusion into the phone booth itself. The Court granted certiorari. Question Presented: Does the Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable searches and seizures require the police to obtain a search warrant in order to wiretap a public pay phone? Conclusion: Yes. The Court ruled that Katz was entitled to Fourth Amendment protection for his conversations and that a physical intrusion into the area he occupied was unnecessary to bring the Amendment into play. "The Fourth Amendment protects people, not places," wrote Justice Potter Stewart for the Court. A concurring opinion by John Marshall Harlan introduced the idea of a 'reasonable' expectation of Fourth Amendment protection. The government gambles away freedom by chasing Katz. Putting a leash on politicians is like herding cats.

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