Dog search sparks outcry

Police’s K-9 probe, without warrant, brings ACLU attention

Alice Boatner returned from running errands with her boyfriend to find her cat, Tobias, cowering in a bedroom while a police officer dressed in SWAT clothes and his K-9 searched through her apartment.

That warrantless — and unconstitutional — search in May, along with dozens of other drug-dog searches at The Suites Supportive Housing Community in Longmont, prompted a national controversy, one that the Longmont Housing Authority admitted in a report last week had “coalesced into a Category 5 storm.”

“It was really a violation of people’s privacy and their rights,” Boatner, 52, said in a recent interview. “That whole situation was appalling and rude and was weird. It left me, and I’m sure a lot of people, feeling not really good at all.

“It makes you feel small.” An alleged heroin overdose death of a resident in April caused the housing authority to have Longmont police and their drug dogs participate during monthly inspections of apartments at The Suites, email records obtained under Colorado’s open-records laws show. The management was concerned that two residents were dealing drugs, according to the emails.

But the searches stoked a rebellion from residents, who complained poverty doesn’t mean they give up rights protecting them from unlawful searches.

Now the American Civil Liberties

Union of Colorado is preparing for a lawsuit. And the response from local authorities, who have refused to release a Weld County Sheriff’s Office report that concluded the warrantless searches were not consistent with Longmont Police Department standards, has left others in the community fuming and subjected the town to national media scorn. An internal-affairs investigation by the Longmont Safety Department, which is in charge of the police department, is ongoing.

“Watergate comes to mind,” one Longmont resident said in an email to housing authority officials as he expressed concern about the bumbling response by housing authorities, who sought to hold board meetings without the public present as the controversy grew.

The Suites is supposed to be refuge for those who are down on their luck. It offers 81 units of subsidized, low-income housing for individuals with an annual income of less than $33,200 or for a family of four making $51,200.

One person was filled with gratitude earlier this year upon learning the housing authority had approved a unit for himself and Polar Bear, a new cat he had rescued from a shelter, with the help of a friend who paid $42 for the pet’s shots.

“My life has been a harsh one,” he wrote to a community manager in one email. “This is very odd to me. Over the past couple days, I’ve noticed I have become almost like a street dog waiting for who was going to kick me next.”

A Buddhist, he wanted to know if his burning of incense would violate the no-smoking rule, and whether it would be OK if he went camping for a day or two and left food out for Polar Bear. Such questions seem quaint after the national controversy over the K-9 searches at the complex.

A June letter informing residents that police and K-9s would be accompanying housing inspectors didn’t inform residents they had a constitutional right to re- fuse entry to police without a search warrant. Records show no arrests were made from searches in May and June, although dogs alerted at least twice to possible drugs. In one instance, a resident’s probation officer was called.

Residents soon were complaining, housing authority emails show. In a June 5 email, Alma Collins, a manager at The Suites, told Krystal Erazo, the housing authority director, that tenants were up in arms about the K-9s. Complaints ranged from invasion of privacy to fears that pet cats could be harmed.

When Erazo emailed back that the law gives residents the right to refuse entry by officers and K-9s, Collins reacted with surprise. “I was not aware that residents had to give consent for K-9s. That’s good info to pass on and will probably help reduce upset about it.”

Residents signed a petition they titled: “Notice of Entry Denied to Police with a Warrant,” which cited the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.

The conflict went public a day after the petition when Kyle Clark did a report on Denver’s 9News.

Erazo defended the searches to the TV station. “Usually it helps the residents feel really secure in that we’re following up,” she said. “We’re holding residents accountable, it’s an opportunity for the dogs to train.

“If there is concern, it kind of sparks some curiosity for me. You know, what are they concerned about if (the officers’) only job is to ensure there aren’t drugs in the unit?”

The news became national after The Washington Post highlighted the searches in an opinion column that stated, “Low-income people are not the equivalent of tackling dummies, or lab rats or volunteers on some police training course. You can’t use poor people to train your police dogs.”

Police suspended their participation and the use of the dogs, stating there had been notification issues. But drama has since gripped Longmont, a town of about 100,000 north of Denver and about an hour’s drive from Rocky Mountain National Park.

Complaints started rolling into officials at the housing authority and at city hall. “My jaw is still dropped,” read one email, which added, “Please take a class in why you are an American!!” In another email, Collins said she was being pilloried on social media, including from her friends posting on Facebook.

Housing authority officials sought to buck up the staff, noting that at least The Suites had passed its fire alarm test. As tensions escalated, Longmont Councilwoman Polly Christensen, in a lateJune email to a concerned resident, said the damage, for a town the size of Longmont, “qualifies as huge.”

“I believe most Americans want to live in a town they are proud of,” Christensen wrote. “To be portrayed as a town where squadrons of police burst into rooms of vulnerable people with snarling dogs looking for drugs, as the image put forth by these allegations, is unfair and damaging. I have had many friends from inside AND outside Longmont ask me what happened.”

The ACLU of Colorado is planning to sue. “People don’t have to give up their constitutional rights to live in subsidized housing,” said group legal director Mark Silverstein.

Authorities now concede mistakes were made. “Once the inspections started on May 10, 2017, law enforcement should have recognized that any resistance or even apparent consent was not volitional given the uneven relationship between landlord and tenant,” David Herrera, the housing authority’s lawyer, wrote in a report to the housing authority board released recently.

It’s not a sufficient apology for Ray Appling, 46, who ended up at The Suites after losing her home during a downturn in housing values and after being laid off from work.

“I fell to the safety net,” said Appling, who is seeking a degree in psychology. “Why should that make me a suspected criminal suddenly? I resent being treated like there’s a crack pipe on my counter. As far as I’m concerned, they have no right to run a dog shelter let alone a housing authority when they demonstrate this level of incompetence.”