Springfield K9s find drugs in 25 percent of searches
LAW | Patrick Yeagle
Flip a coin and pick a side. Repeat 50 times. Chances are, you’ll guess the coin toss more often than drug-sniffing police dogs in Springfield found contraband in 2012.
Traffic stop data reported by the Springfield Police Department shows the police found contraband in only 25 percent of searches prompted by a drug dog’s alert. By comparison, guessing a coin toss has a theoretical 50 percent chance of being correct. Despite a 2011 state law that mandated training for drug-sniffing police dogs, Springfield’s canines continue to come up empty in most searches.
According to data collected from the Springfield Police Department by the Illinois Department of Transportation, Springfield police searched 51 vehicles following alerts from drug-sniffing dogs in 2012. The officers found contraband in only 13 of those searches, a hit rate of just 25 percent. Before 2012, state law didn’t mandate IDOT to collect statistics on drug-sniff searches from police agencies, so data from prior years may be inconsistent and may not contain every use of drugsniffing dogs in traffic stops. Still, the searches that were reported by the Springfield Police Department for past years show the hit rate has never reached 40 percent, and is often much lower.
In August 2011, the Illinois General Assembly passed a law requiring drug-sniffing police dogs to undergo rigorous training and obtain certification under a nationwide standard known as SWGDOG. The law mandated that law enforcement agencies in Illinois which wanted to use drug-sniffing dogs had to get the dogs certified through an approved instruction program by June 1, 2012, and repeat the certification every year.
Although Springfield’s drug dogs got certified during the first half of the year, their hit rate for contraband improved only a few percentage points during the second half of the year. From the start of January through the end of June during 2012, Springfield’s the police found contraband in five out of the 23 times they were alerted by dogs, a hit rate of about 22 percent. From July through December of the same year, the police found contraband eight times out of the 28 searches prompted by dog alerts, a hit rate of about 29 percent. That means even after the dogs underwent state certification, they were wrong more than twothirds of the time.
In the vast majority of the 18,331 traffic stops for 2012, Springfield police didn’t use drug-sniffing dogs. However, the number of searches resulting from dog sniffs has risen significantly since the data reporting began in 2004. That year, Springfield police reported searching only seven times following a drug dog alert. In 2012, that number was 51, with 68 such searches in 2011.
Springfield defense attorney Mark Wykoff says dog sniff searches are eroding the Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches.
“The Fourth Amendment has gone to the dogs, literally and figuratively,” he says. “One of the worst things I’ve seen in my criminal law practice is the erosion of fundamental constitutional protections and outsourcing them to dogs.”
Wykoff explains that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a case arising from Illinois that a citizen does not have an expectation of privacy regarding scents that waft from his or her vehicle. That means dog sniff searches don’t violate the Fourth Amendment prohibition on unreasonable searches. Additionally, he says courts have also ruled that a drug-sniffing dog’s record of finding contraband in the field doesn’t matter as long as the dog has a demonstrated record of finding contraband during certification.
“The court held that as long as the state can demonstrate the dog is properly trained and certified, that’s good enough,” he said. “Now all they’re giving us is an eight-and-a-half by 11 piece of paper saying the dog is a wonderful sniffer.”
Wykoff also raises concerns about dog handlers overtly or even inadvertently signaling dogs to alert, as well as incentivizing dogs to alert by offering them treats. He says the use of drug-sniffing dogs also affects the Sixth Amendment right of an accused person to confront his or her accuser.
“How do you confront a dog?” Wykoff said. “Unfortunately, the courts have held the way we can cross examine a dog is to do it through the handler because they’re a team. The handler is the spokesperson for the dog. But if the dog handler was cuing the dog, the dog can’t say ‘The reason I alerted is that my handler was pulling on my chain harder than he usually does.’ You’re urinating into the wind when you cross-examine a handler because the handler is going to stick to the state’s attorney’s script.”
Springfield isn’t alone in having drugsniffing dogs with high rates of false alerts. The data from IDOT shows other similarly-sized cities in central Illinois also have mostly low hit rates. The Champaign Police Department led the pack in 2012 with a 55.6% hit rate, meaning that department’s dogs were right slightly more than half of the time.
The statewide average hit rate is 60.5 percent, partly because some departments like the Sangamon County Sheriff’s Office perform drug sniff searches only in limited circumstances. The sheriff’s office reported performing only three drug sniff searches during traffic stops in 2012 and found contraband in all three searches.
Kenny Winslow, acting police chief for the Springfield Police Department, could not be reached for comment by publication.
