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After officers noticed Mr Eckert's posture, they called a drug dog, which indicated a small on narcotics on Mr Eckert's driver seat.

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Originally posted by BYTEMITE:
This wasn't about drugs, this was about power and putting someone "back in their place."

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The purported reason for this treatment was suspicion of narcotics possession. A more credible explanation is that the police wanted to punish Eckert for politely asserting his rights during an encounter a few weeks earlier.

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Our investigation reveals another chapter. Another man, another minor traffic violation, another incident with Leo the K-9 and another example of the violation of a man's body.

Police reports state deputies stopped Timothy Young because he turned without putting his blinker on.

Again, Leo the K-9 alerts on Young's seat.

Young is taken to the Gila Regional Medical Center in Silver City, and just like Eckert, he's subjected to medical procedures including x-rays of his stomach and an anal exam.

Again, police found nothing, and again the procedures were done without consent, and in a county not covered by the search warrant.

We've learned more about that drug dog, Leo, that seems to get it wrong pretty often. He might be getting it wrong because he's not even certified in New Mexico.

If you take a look at the dog's certification, the dog did get trained. But his certification to be a drug dog expired in April 2011. K-9s need yearly re-certification courses, and Leo is falling behind.

"We have done public requests to find anything that would show this dog has been trained, we have evidence that this dog has had false alerts in the past," Eckert's attorney Shannon Kennedy said.

The doctors from the Gila Regional Medical Center have been turned over to the state licensing board. It's possible they could lose the ability to practice to medicine.

And the police officers will be answering to a law enforcement board.

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In 2010, a team of researchers at the University of California, Davis set out to test the reliability of drug- and bomb-sniffing dogs.

The team assembled 18 police dogs and their handlers and gave them a routine task: go through a room and sniff out the drugs and explosives.

But there was a twist. The room was clean. No drugs, no explosives.

In order to pass the test, the handlers and their dogs had to go through the room and detect nothing.

But of 144 runs, that happened only 21 times, for a failure rate of 85 percent.

Although drug-sniffing dogs are supposed to find drugs on their own, the researchers concluded that they were influenced by their handlers, and that's what led to such a high failure rate.

The reliability of drug dogs and their handlers is at the heart of a lawsuit filed in state district court by two Nevada Highway Patrol K-9 troopers and a consultant, who claim that the Metropolitan Police Department's police dogs, and eventually NHP's own dogs, were "trick ponies" that responded to their handlers' cues, and therefore routinely violated citizens' rights to lawful search under the Fourth Amendment.

The lawsuit goes on to make a number of other accusations in its 104-page complaint: that the Metropolitan Police Department is a racketeering organization, that money seized by motorists was misappropriated by the Department of Public Safety, that the two troopers were subjected to harassment and intimidation by their agency.

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Originally posted by FREMDFIRMA:


NM woman comes forward with illegal probing claims.
http://www.kob.com/article/stories/S3212603.shtml

Almost enough to make you wonder if them trailer park UFO stories were just really drunk rednecks mistaking officer unfriendlys squadcar for a saucer.

-F

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1.6 mil

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Originally posted by Wishimay:
1.6 mil

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/city-county-settle-nm-anal-probe-la
wsuit-21516354

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