If I told you that that the police pulled over a guy for a minor traffic violation and then drug him off to a hospital for anal probes, you would probably tell me I told you about that yesterday. But you would be operating under the illusion that this doesn’t happen all the time in America. We have another story!
Okay, it didn’t happen again, it happened before. The same police force used the same untrained drug dog to drag an innocent man to the same hospital outside the court’s jurisdiction for anal probing. There are really only two differences. First, it was innocent citizen Timothy Young this time instead of innocent citizen David Eckert. Second, the traffic violation was a turn without a signal instead of an incomplete stop.
The bad part about this is that in the end, all the blame will probably go to the K-9 named Leo. Of course, I’m not buying it. Let’s suppose that poor old Leo starts barking at a drivers seat. Leave aside the whole question of why Leo was brought out to sniff around. (Was Young also clenching his buttocks?) After he does that, they take the driver to the hospital and thoroughly examine his anal cavity. No drugs are found. Doesn’t this make them think that leveraging minor traffic stops into major anal probes might be a bad idea?
But here’s the thing. I don’t think these are unfortunate accidents or mistakes. My understanding is that bringing out the drug dogs requires its own reasonable suspicion. So these guys are taking what sound like pretexts for stops: not signaling and not coming to a complete stop. Then they coming up with a pretext for the dog: clenched buttocks?! And then they are using the dog as a pretext to go to a hospital and go absolutely search crazy.
It looks like fewer procedures were done on Young than on Eckert. This may indicate that the officers were freaking out at the prospect of yet another negative on their anal probing. But really! What kind of a person jumps from a traffic stop to “You got drugs up your butt!” Because that seems to be what’s going on here. I’ll be watching this situation closely. Just with what we know now, this is beyond the pale.
