A Police Dog Handler Who Is a Lying Liar

Read this one to the end. It's fun and illuminating ... I promise.

Over on Facebook, I reposted a piece from 2015, and entitled it "Police Lie and So Do Their Dogs".

Let's start with something we all know and which has become painfully clear in recent months: police lie routinely and actually teach lying at the police academy.

Lying is considered a core competency of the job.

In short, police are lying liars.

And guess what? So too are their dogs.

Most police dogs and their handlers are so poorly trained, and bad bites so common and payouts so large, that increasing numbers of police departments are reconsidering canine units altogether.

Where the world of lying, dogs, and police really comes together is in the arena of drug sniffing dogs which are often trained to throw false positives in order to gin up probable cause to search a person, locker, or vehicle.

In a ruling earlier in 2015, a federal appeals court upheld the conviction of a man caught with cocaine in his car, but said that Lex, the "drug dog" deployed by the police was so incompetent he should not be used to establish probable cause for searches. As the Associated Press story notes:

“Tuesday's ruling pointed to records showing Lex nearly always signals drugs are present — 93 percent of the time. And it cited other figures that indicated he is frequently wrong — more than 40 percent of the time.

"’Lex's overall accuracy rate ... is not much better than a coin flip,’ the ruling says.”

The court upheld Bentley's conviction in part because other indications at the traffic stop -- including contradictory statements made by the defendant -- may have separately justified a search.

But the dog? That dog was simply being used as a bogus pretextual search machine. As the court said: "not much better than a coin flip."

Of course, that makes him the perfect police dog. No doubt the Canine Training Institute of Emden, Ill, which takes credit for training Lex, will now be flooded with requests from police departments looking for dogs with the same set of "skills" and training.

The only way to fight back is the obvious one: If you are ever on a jury, assume the police officer may be a liar and that his or her dog may be a lying liar as well.

The chance that either one is telling the truth appears to be no better than a coin toss.

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Sources linked here >> https://terriermandotcom.blogspot.com/2015/07/police-lie-and-so-do-their-dogs.html

There was a bit of back and forth about inadequate training of screening and training of police and dogs, and a link to a Washington Post article about the case and the case law itself

Matt Mullenix weighed in with a truth, "Dogs know what the handlers want," and I added a link to the rather famous "Learned Pig" case (no pun intended) which has its own wikipedia page.  For those who don't know this is the first (or most famous) case of any animal "reading" its owner to give her or him  whatever it wanted.

Then a woman by the name of Leigha Genduso weighed in. She wrote:

I’ve been working with dogs for 17 years, I’m also a former state police K9 trooper. Your post is nothing but nonsense that’s translated into fake propaganda. Dogs don’t lie they look for the source of odor for the reward (which is done during training and not really life scenarios due to a potential false odor hit). Just like humans, they are also not perfect... sometimes the source they hit on had old odor (example, mechanical hide that was used several times with large quantities and shortly the odor substance is removed), other times it’s simply a false hit.

In order for you to make the arrest, you must ARTICULATE the reasonable suspicion first off that you have to search the vehicle, then probable suspicion to utilize the K9 for a search. The dog “Lex” you speak of sounds like a very poorly trained dog. That’s on the handler, not the dog. 99 percent of the time in the commonwealth of Massachusetts, the defense attorney requests all training logs for that specific dog and handler (we had a full 8 hour shift of maintenance training every week for drugs, bite work & tracking).

Thanks for writing this ridiculous nonsense. I’ll be sure to share so other handlers can see what absolute nonsense is being spewed out in social media.

OK. 

But everything about her post was wrong.

Not a little wrong -- wildly so.  She was either deeply and dangerously ignorant, or a liar.... or both.

I began by noting that the police lie all the time, quoting a Slate magazine piece asking what can be done about it.

This tendency to lie pervades all police work, not just high-profile violence, and it has the power to ruin lives. Law enforcement officers lie so frequently—in affidavits, on post-incident paperwork, on the witness stand—that officers have coined a word for it: testi-lying.

I then noted that the "articulable reason" law is called a "Terry Stop" (Terry v Ohio) and that lying to create an articulable pretext for a search is "Terry Stop 101" and that it even has a name: a "pretextual stop".

I provided a link to the Marshal Project where they note that "the Supreme Court has made it legal for cops to pull you over for just about anything."

I then noted that false positives with police dogs were a widely known phenomenon and that I was surprised she did not know it.

Your lack of knowledge about major studies in this arena is sad.  The Massachusetts police force only requires high school. Not too many life learners or readers, I suspect. But here you go.

The link was to an NPR summary of a UC Davis Study about false markings by police dogs, but I followed up with a link to the actual study:

The performance of drug- and explosives-sniffing dog/handler teams is affected by human handlers’ beliefs, possibly in response to subtle, unintentional handler cues, a study by researchers at UC Davis has found.

The study, published in the January issue of the journal Animal Cognition, found that detection-dog/handler teams erroneously “alerted,” or identified a scent, when there was no scent present more than 200 times — particularly when the handler believed that there was scent present.

“It isn’t just about how sensitive a dog’s nose is or how well-trained a dog is. There are cognitive factors affecting the interaction between a dog and a handler that can impact the dog’s performance,” said Lisa Lit, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Neurology and the study’s lead author.

"These might be as important — or even more important — than the sensitivity of a dog’s nose.”

Now none of what I was saying was new or secret knowledge.  How could this lady not know it? 

There was something WRONG with this woman. 

Her tone was wrong, and her ignorance was... breathtaking.

Was she even police?

I looked at her Facebook page.  There was something wrong here.  I've spent 40 years looking for fakes and liars, cheats, and crooks.  I'm not always right, but if I have an itch, it's generally worth a scratch. 

I googled her name.

Boom.

It was like hitting the slots.

In 50 years of reading news articles, and in 40 years of writing about crime and law enforcement, I have never read a piece quite like Howie Carr's Boston Herald profile of Leigha Genduso.  Back in November, he wrote:

Trooper Genduso is tanned, rested and ready to resume her rightful place at the pinnacle of the most corrupt law-enforcement agency in the United States.

This is a woman who has lived her life by the motto of the MSP — To Protect and Steal.

Who better than Leigha Genduso? Oh sure, there’s apparently an endless supply of bent cops to continue enabling the staties’ endless scandals — jackbooted thugs so crooked they need a corkscrew to get into their booze-stained jodhpurs when they roll out of bed hung over at the crack of noon.

Any number of sticky-fingered, drunk-driving, girlfriend-beating, shooting-up-the-Expressway, flashing-to-young-children Level 3 sex-offender embezzlers will be throwing their Smokey-the-Bear hats into the ring for the job as the next colonel. But unlike most of the rest of the candidates, Leigha

Genduso is not a one-dimensional criminal.

She is a renaissance crook, a jack of all grifts. If she were on a football team, she’d be playing offense, defense and special teams. Crime-wise, she’s a triple- or maybe quadruple-threat.

You recall Leigha Genduso, don’t you? She was forced out as a statie last year after it came out that she was hired in spite, or maybe because, of her prior life as a career criminal and drug abuser. Another nationwide search.

Before she was sworn in and handed a badge, gun, cruiser, K-9 and $140,000 a year, Leigha was slinging drinks in hot pants at the world-famous Scuttlebutts bar in Salem, not to mention such other fine-dining establishments as Funky Murphy’s and Centerfolds.

But those were just her day jobs. In her spare time, La Genduso was a) a gangster’s moll, b) a drug kingpin, c) a money launderer, d) an income-tax evader, and e) a “perjurizer,” as she put it, before a federal grand jury probing organized crime.

The MSP’s nationwide search for Leigha began and ended inside the town limits of what is Ground Zero for political corruption in Massachusetts — Shrewsbury. That’s the hometown of both Leigha and her BFF, Lt. Gov. Karyn Polito. (Check out all their photos together on social media.)

It also didn’t hurt that after she ratted her drug-dealing gangster boyfriend into federal prison, Leigha hooked up with the No. 2 guy in the State Police, a bullet-headed Neanderthal named Dan Risteen. Risteen, who just scored a three-digit license plate, bears an amazing resemblance to the TV detective Kojak, which by an amazing coincidence also happened to be the name of Leigha’s MSP dog.

There are 241,845 reasons why Leigha would want to be the next colonel, and all of them have George Washington’s picture on them. 

Now she’s back in the hospitality industry from which she came — I won’t name the mill, because the last time I outed her employer, a barroom brawl broke out that night. But let’s face it, whatever Leigha’s making in tips, she’s no longer in the same income bracket as her old friends in the hackerama.

Consider: Polito makes $165,000 a year. Another of Leigha’s selfie buddies, ex-Col. Marian McGovern, is collecting a pension of $165,131 a year. Her old main squeeze, Risteen, is grabbing $160,389 in his kiss in the mail, and his MSP buddy (and fellow bit player in “The Departed”) Frank Hughes is pocketing $174,868.

The MSP, we know, is trying to upgrade its technology, and not just so it can destroy incriminating evidence involving its felonious time sheets in a more timely, statute-of-limitations-friendly fashion.

 

Who better to preside over these technological upgrades than Leigha Genduso, who in addition to her other underworld accomplishments developed the nation’s premier website for outing drug informants in organized-crime cases, WhosARat.com.

She was asked by the grand jury who came up with that name for the site her gangster boyfriend set up.

“Oh, I did!” Trooper Genduso testified. “I said the name as a joke and he stuck with it. That was me!”

Leigha Genduso: She hasn’t just studied crime, she’s lived it. The staties are dirty, but how many of them have first-hand experience laundering hundreds of thousands of dollars in drug money deposits?

“It was always under the sum of $10,000… Because anything over $10,000 will get you reported by the bank to the IRS.”

Col. Leigha Genduso — has a nice ring, doesn’t it? Drinks are on WhosARat.com at Scuttlebutts.

Wow.  

Read that again.

Not only is this lady no longer a cop, she's a thief, drug dealer, drug user, serial liar, mobster, fraudster, money-launderer, and bar-keep floozy who was dishonorably terminated from the police force for all (or most) of the above.  

How did she get a job with the State Troopers in Massachusetts?  

Apparently it had something to do with her live-in boyfriend who held the number two or three command post within the State Trooper's office.  

 
For the record, Howie Carr is a conservative talk radio personality in New England. He's a guy who you would normally like cops.... provided they are honest. 

But he (apparently) doesn't like crooks, thieves, and mobsters.  An old school conservative. Law and Order before it became ... Law and Odor. 

Carr has written several books about the New England mob, so he knows what's he's taking about when it comes to organized crime and Massachusetts police corruption.

And apparently he has Leigha Genduso's number. 

And now you do too.

Want to read more?  Knock yourself out.  Trust me.... the above is the nice version.  She's penned a self-published stream of consciousness that is pretty ugly. It's a moral whore-scape; a kind of illiterate  gypsy wedding story penned by someone who doesn't quite get that everyone is taking pictures because the whole thing is a shambles.

Set aside the mob stuff, the drug dealing, the drug taking, the money-laundering, the tax evasion, the perjury, the sex-for-jobs and influence stuff, her self-professed joy in assaulting people, and her (apparent) alcohol or emotional problems.

How can this woman know so little about police dogs?   I am quite serious; it's either jaw-dropping ignorance or straight up lying without reason.   Or both.

Ms. Genduso only has a high school, and she has spent most of her adult life committing crime,  slinging booze at dodgy bars, and sleeping with anyone who can help her out.  Her police career was built on a lie and was never dependent on competency. I doubt she has read a serious book in her life.

But she's also an unreformed liar who, as of October of last year, was still presenting herself as a State Trooper on InstaGram where she says she is "Owner/Trainer of Andromeda K9" (website soon!) and "owner of Molly - detection Lab".

Right.  The drug dealer, liar, and apparently incompetent dog handler is going to put herself out there as the person to bust school kids and job site worker for pot?

As the folks who first broke the story put it:

I think it would be best if Leigha Genduso just avoided any involvement in the law enforcement side of drug dealing. Considering her past history as a drug dealer it seems hypocritical for her to actively assist in arresting people for drugs when she avoided prison by sending Sean Bucci to jail for 12 years by testifying that she was his business partner.  

Oh, and she has a "legit movie contract" she signed on to last year?

Right. Sure. Could be. 

Leigha Genduso would never lie to us, would she? 

Caveat emptor people.  Caveat emptor.