Trying to Take a Bite Out of Crime via Felons’ Dogs (Published 2010)

When drug agents in southeast Tennessee tried to arrest people suspected of dealing methamphetamine last month, they ran into an all-too common obstacle: a large, snarling dog on the front porch.

As the officers persuaded the homeowner to come out and chain the animal, the main suspect and her partner flushed away the drugs, the agents say. “The delay wiped out the chance for a conspiracy case against the man she was with,” said Mike Hall, director of the district drug task force in Charleston, Tenn.

While menacing characters with dogs in spiked collars are nothing new, the use of aggressive animals as sentries and weapons by drug dealers and gangs has reached new heights in some regions. They threaten innocent neighbors, police officers and, as this example showed, enforcement of the law. One of four drug searches and arrests in Mr. Hall’s four-county district now involves a house with guard dogs, he said.

“These dogs are the gang-member version of buying a home-security system,” said Carter F. Smith, a gang expert and professor of criminal justice at Middle Tennessee University, protecting dealers from predatory human rivals as well as arrest.

Now Tennessee legislators, at the urging of law enforcement officials and even animal-welfare advocates, have passed new measures aimed at curbing the use of mean dogs by criminals.

A bill awaiting Gov. Phil Bredesen’s signature would bar felons convicted of violent or drug-related crimes from keeping “potentially vicious” dogs for 10 years after being released from prison or probation. Based on studies showing that unsterilized dogs are most apt to be aggressive, it would also require that any dog owned by felons be spayed or neutered and implanted with a microchip for identification.

Many communities have tried to limit the presence of large, aggressive dogs, sometimes singling out pit bulls and Rottweilers. That provokes complaints from animal lovers, who say there are no bad breeds, just bad masters.

The Tennessee proposal, modeled on a 2006 law in Illinois that was the first of its kind, focuses just on felons and also avoids naming breeds. A dog of any kind, even a Chihuahua, could be branded as potentially vicious if it has been reported twice for lunging at people or biting.

“Breed-specific laws do not get at the root of the problem, which is the owners,” said Sherry L. Rout, a legislative advocate in Memphis for the American Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which helped draft the bills in Tennessee and Illinois.

Laws nearly everywhere allow for the seizure and destruction of dogs that attack people or animals. In the new bill, if a dog is labeled as potentially vicious, the felon must give it away or turn it over to animal control. “The thought is that a dog in the hands of the wrong person can be dangerous,” Ms. Rout said. “But a dog that’s walking the line may not be dangerous in the hands of the right person.”

In Illinois, officers have used the sterilization requirement as a way to build cases against suspected dealers. If they spot an apparently intact male dog, for example, officers can justify stopping suspects for questioning or even searching their homes.

Mr. Hall, the Tennessee drug agent, said that when the canine threat is known in advance, one member of the raiding team carries a fire extinguisher for fending off an attack. If that does not work, they try a Taser. In a couple of cases each year, he said, officers have to shoot the animal.

In one case last year, he recalled, the agents missed seizing $150,000 in illegal cash because of a dog that growled from his outdoor doghouse. They arrested a man suspected of dealing drugs, who later told them that he had buried the cash under the doghouse, just like in the movie “American Gangster.” When they went back to look, the stash was gone. It had been retrieved and taken abroad by the man’s wife.

“We didn’t think to look there,” Mr. Hall said. “And to be honest, I don’t think any of us wanted to try to look there.”