Problems with dog sniffs
An excellent expose by the Tribune shows that alerts by police drug-sniffing dogs in suburban Illinois are usually wrong, and that the hit rates for car searches resulting from the use of dogs are nearly twice as high for whites than for Hispanics (“Drug dogs often wrong; Police canines can fall short, but observers cite residue and poor training as factors,” Page 1, Jan. 6).
These numbers do not tell the full story. Dog sniffs are menacing, especially for minority motorists, in light of historical abuses committed with police dogs. Dog sniffs also are humiliating, taking place in full view of passing motorists, friends and strangers alike, many of whom probably conclude that the people subjected to dog sniffs must be guilty of something. Full car searches based on false dog alerts are even more frightening and embarrassing.
The same state database used by the Tribune shows a similar racial disparity in so-called consent searches, which occur when police lack legal cause to search a car but nonetheless request permission to search. In 2009, Illinois State Police troopers were 3.2 times more likely to consent search Hispanic motorists compared to white motorists, yet the resulting hit rate for whites was 2.7 times higher than for Hispanics. The data are similar for other years and departments.
These data demonstrate the need to reform dog sniffs and consent searches during routine traffic stops. Dog sniffs should be banned absent individualized reasonable suspicion that a car contains illegal drugs.
In 2005, legislation to mandate this standard was sponsored by almost all members of the Illinois House Black Caucus. This standard should be constitutionally mandated. Without this objective standard, too many police officers use hunches to decide which cars to sniff, and those hunches too often rest on unconscious or even conscious bias. The inevitable result of this unbridled discretion is the stark racial disparity found by the Tribune.
Requests for consent, like canine sniffs, are based on hunches instead of objective evidence, leading predictably to racial disparity. Roadside search requests are inherently coercive, which is why more than 95 percent of motorists of all races give so-called consent to Illinois State Police troopers. Thus, individualized suspicion is not a meaningful fix, and consent searches of cars should be banned.
The state’s dog-sniff and consent-search data also show the need for other reforms.
First, a state statute calls for a task force to study such data, and to recommend improvements in police policies. Unfortunately, this task force has never met. The governor immediately should convene it.
In turn, the task force should promptly recommend individualized suspicion for canine sniffs and a ban on consent searches.
Second, the Tribune could not have performed its study without data collected under the Illinois Traffic Stop Statistical Study Act of 2003, a police accountability law championed by then-State Sen. Barack Obama. Unfortunately, that statute will expire in 2015. The Legislature now should make this critical statute permanent.
Third, the Legislature should create a statewide system for training, certifying and monitoring drug-sniffing police dogs.
A regulatory agency should track the hit rates of car searches based on each dog’s alerts.
The study act should be amended to ensure that the public has access to these data.
Dogs with poor hit rates or racially disparate hit rates should be retrained or retired.
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Harvey Grossman, legal director, ACLU of Illinois, Chicago
Racial disparities
This is in response to “Blacks more likely to be imprisoned for drug crimes; African-Americans nearly 5 times more likely than whites to get prison sentence for low-level violations, Illinois study says” (News, Jan. 31).
This Chicago Tribune headline, broadcasting prison sentencing disparities Illinois African-American citizens face, underscores what our nation is unwilling to address: From housing to hunger, employment and prison, racial disparities are all too real.
The article plainly states our reality. Blacks in Illinois are almost five times more likely to be sentenced to prison for low-level drug crimes than whites. And in Cook County blacks charged with low-level drug possession were eight times more likely than whites to be sentenced to prison.
David Olson, chairman of Loyola University Chicago’s criminal justice department, noted that minorities were not necessarily more likely to use more drugs than whites but are much more likely to be arrested.
Nationally, even though white drug users outnumber blacks by a five-to-one margin, the U.S. Department of Justice reported that in 2003 blacks constituted 56.7 percent of all drug offenders admitted to state prisons while whites constituted only 23.3 percent.
According to the Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights under the Law, in the area of equal justice and access to justice, racial minorities continue to suffer a higher incarceration rate than non-minorities. Widespread disparities on account of race continue to persist. At least three-fifths of all state court criminal defendants are minorities. Blacks in particular constitute 44 percent of state court criminal defendants, while only 13 percent of the general population. Black men are 6.5 times as likely to be incarcerated as white men. And approximately one in nine black males between the ages of 25 and 29 are incarcerated, and one in three can expect to go to prison in their lifetime.
These disparities are driven by structural and institutional inequality. Civil rights laws have all but been abandoned or drastically underfunded and unenforced.
We vote in record numbers. We serve in the military. We’re playing on athletic fields. We sing. We dance. We entertain. Yet, there’s a painful indifference to the reduced life options of African-Americans. We’re No. 1 in infant mortality. We have lower life expectancy. There’s an obvious health gap, but more than that, a broad range of structural gaps that must be addressed.
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Rev. Jesse L. Jackson Sr., founder and president, Rainbow PUSH Coalition, Chicago
Reason for taxes
To all those who support the tea party in its objections to paying taxes, I would suggest they take a trip to a Third World country.
People there don’t pay taxes and they don’t have a middle class either.
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June Baker, Chicago
Smoking dangers
Many smokers outside buildings may be a factor in cancer, heart disease and other diseases. We should ask smokers to smoke away from entrances.
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James T. Struck, Chicago
