Georgia has no uniform training requirement for police canines

They wear a badge, help make arrests and even fight crime, but a Channel 2 Action News investigation found Georgia’s four-legged officers differ from their human partners in a major way — training is optional.

“Pretty much it’s a way they can search your car without your consent,” said Joseph Anderson. “It’s not right at all.”

Anderson is one of three men who told investigative reporter Jodie Fleischer an officer used a K-9 to violate their rights.

Under Georgia law, a police dog can search the outside of any vehicle, even without the owner’s permission. If the dog alerts to the presence of a narcotics odor outside of the vehicle, the officer then has probable cause to search inside the car.

“It’s amazing to me that there’s no policies in place for that type of thing, because you’re talking about a four-legged animal, which is being used to determine the outcome of someone’s constitutional rights,” said Jermaine Muhammad.

But the way Georgia law reads right now, an officer can go to the pound and pick out a dog and start using it tomorrow.

“Obviously there’s an abuse of power and there’s a pattern to this thing,” added Muhammad.

Muhammad, Anderson and a third driver, Daniel Green, were each separately stopped by the same Dunwoody police officer last summer for things like an expired tag, a back-up light being out, and a cracked windshield. In all three cases the officer asked the same question.

“’Well, do you have any guns or drugs?’” recounted Anderson. “And I’m like, ‘No, sir, I’m just trying to get back to work.’”

Anderson’s traffic stop was at the end of his lunch break just outside the Walmart store where he worked. He showed the officer his identification badge.

But the officer instead decided to call in a Doraville police officer and K-9 named Tryko.

Muhammad and Green described almost identical experiences.

“He brought the dog around the car, and you can see him tapping on the window twice and you can see how the dog reacted to the tap,” said Green.

In all three case, the officer said Tryko alerted.

“He said he found something like a little speck of marijuana,” said Anderson, “He didn’t show it to me so I don’t know what exactly he found.”

The officer told Green he found marijuana residue.

“I was like, ‘Well, can I see it?’” Green recalls. “He was like, ‘I threw it all out.'”

“They said they found an odor,” recalled Muhammad.

Despite Doraville’s K-9 deployment reports listing 1 gram, 1 gram, and .5 grams respectively, none of the three men were charged with anything drug related.

In fact, Doraville records show out of 17 traffic stops Tryko was called to assist in last year, he alerted at 15 of them.

Officers said they found drugs or drug residue during 12 of those searches, but filed drug charges in just four of them.

Channel 2 Action News filed an open records request to see whether Tryko and his handler were following Doraville’s K-9 use policy and found the agency does not have one.

“If there’s not a standard, then you make your own standard, and sometimes that’s dangerous,” said Ken Vance, director of Georgia’s Peace Officer Standards and Training Council (POST), which oversees training for the state’s law enforcement officers.

That’s exactly what Anderson said he was afraid of.

“He was pretty much trying to stop and actually make the dog hit,” Anderson said of the handler.

Mark Mills has been training police dogs for 30 years. He runs a training facility in North Carolina that’s used by law enforcement departments around the country.

“Absolutely no influence from the handler, he should not be talking to the dog, he should not be tapping, he should not be stopping. It should be a constant flow around the car,” said Mills, describing the techniques he teaches.

Mills recommends the dog and handler certify together each year, with weekly training to avoid bad habits or accidental cues.

“I know of no officer that would intentionally do it,” said Mills, “But if he keeps his training records and he does have other people watch him or certify, they could tell him that he’s doing certain things that he maybe ought not be doing.”

In a written statement, a Doraville Police spokesman told Channel 2 the department does nationally certify all of its dogs every year.

Fleischer filed an open records request asking for documentation more than a month ago, but the department could not locate paperwork for Tryko for 2010 and 2011. Tryko was purchased in 2006.

A second K-9 unit, purchased in 2008, was missing documentation from 2009, 2010 and 2011.

A third K-9 unit, purchased in 2011, had all of his certification paperwork.

Fleischer asked the POST director how he can have faith that police dogs and handlers know what they’re doing if the state does not require any standards.

“I don’t know that you can have that faith unless there’s some kind of regulatory control,” Vance responded.

He says the state has traditionally counted on the courts to find the truth.

“If you’re doing it wrong, it’s going to find you out,” said Vance. “But would it find you out quicker if you were registered and certified in the state of Georgia? Probably so.”

Channel 2 filed open records requests with a dozen metro area police departments. The bigger departments with bigger budgets all had specific rules and policies dictating the K-9’s usage, training and certifications. But no two departments had the same requirements.

For example, a head trainer told Channel 2, at his department, a dog is only allowed to circle the outside of a vehicle once when searching for a narcotics odor.

In one of the Doraville videos, the officer clearly walked around the car with the dog twice.

In an even smaller north Georgia town, a driver told Channel 2 the K-9 circled his truck three times before alerting.

He found it odd since he had a bag of marijuana in his pocket and the dog walked right past him twice without noticing.

Vance says he will form a study committee this fall to determine what Georgia’s training and certification standards should be. He says the committee will include POST Council members and dog handlers from different departments.

“The good ones want a certification, the good ones want regulations,” said Vance. He says he’s heard from departments around the state who would like to weed out substandard K-9 units that would give them all a bad name.

“It fits precisely with what I’ve seen time and time again,” said one officer who wanted to remain anonymous.

He came forward to blow the whistle on metro area departments who he feels misuse the dogs. He said he was constantly forced to resist pressure from patrol officers to make his dog alert to get them inside a car.

“It’s common knowledge in law enforcement that that’s what is done,” said the officer.

Doraville’s police chief refused Channel 2’s requests for an interview citing a potential lawsuit from the drivers mentioned above. A spokesman said the department is working on writing a K-9 use policy.

Green says it’s long overdue. “I was violated, and if it happened to me and it happened to us three, then it’s probably happened to a lot more people.”

See the full story at: WSB.