By Cynthia Grau/WJEZ News
Livingston County is home to a total of four police departments with K9 Units and what they do is sometimes unknown to the general public.
Livingston County State’s Attorney Randy Yedinak said his office has partnered with both Dwight and Fairbury police departments for demonstrations and fundraising in bringing home their new K9 officers and he explains what they do.
“In order to pull a vehicle over, in order to search a vehicle for drugs, we need to have what’s called probably cause or reasonable suspicion. These canines, whose smelling is, I think, a thousand times better than ours, so the officers can pull these vehicles over for some sort of traffic violation. If they get the idea that there might be drugs in the car, it’s a simple walking the dog around the car and they can alert to the presence of an odor of these controlled substances,” Yedinak said.
Many also question how arrests work when a dog just alerts its partner of detecting drugs in a vehicle.
“The United States Supreme Court and Illinois Supreme Court have spoken resoundingly about that in that a free air sniff outside of your car is not a search for purposes of the Fourth Amendment and needing a search warrant or anything to that effect, because you’re not going into the car, you’re not searching the person, you’re just simply walking the dog around the outside of the car. That’s something our courts, especially Illinois courts, have spoken on many times and upheld many searches, many arrests, many convictions based on drug K9 sniffs,” Yedinak said.
Yedinak was a guest on a recent Community Forum, where he talks more about the departments’ K9 programs and how they contribute to arrests and potential convictions. That is available at WJEZ.com.
