Armed Polite Society
Main Forums => The Roundtable => Topic started by: Ron on September 13, 2009, 12:43:20 PM
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By REBECCA BOONE, Associated Press Writer Rebecca Boone, Associated Press Writer – 1 hr 2 mins ago
BOISE, Idaho – When police officer Darryll Dowell is on patrol in the southwestern Idaho city of Nampa, he'll pull up at a stoplight and usually start casing the vehicle. Nowadays, his eyes will also focus on the driver's arms, as he tries to search for a plump, bouncy vein.
"I was looking at people's arms and hands, thinking, 'I could draw from that,'" Dowell said.
It's all part of training he and a select cadre of officers in Idaho and Texas have received in recent months to draw blood from those suspected of drunken or drugged driving. The federal program's aim is to determine if blood draws by cops can be an effective tool against drunk drivers and aid in their prosecution.
If the results seem promising after a year or two, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration will encourage police nationwide to undergo similar training.
For years, defense attorneys in Idaho advised clients to always refuse breath tests, Ada County Deputy Prosecutor Christine Starr said. When the state toughened the penalties for refusing the tests a few years ago, the problem lessened, but it's still the main reason that drunk driving cases go to trial in the Boise region, Starr said.
Idaho had a 20 percent breath test refusal rate in 2005, compared with 22 percent nationally, according to an NHTSA study.
Starr hopes the new system will cut down on the number of drunken driving trials. Officers can't hold down a suspect and force them to breath into a tube, she noted, but they can forcefully take blood — a practice that's been upheld by Idaho's Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court.
The nation's highest court ruled in 1966 that police could have blood tests forcibly done on a drunk driving suspect without a warrant, as long as the draw was based on a reasonable suspicion that a suspect was intoxicated, that it was done after an arrest and carried out in a medically approved manner.
The practice of cops drawing blood, implemented first in 1995 in Arizona, has also raised concerns about safety and the credibility of the evidence.
"I would imagine that a lot of people would be wary of having their blood drawn by an officer on the hood of their police vehicle," said Steve Oberman, chair of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers' DUI Committee.
The officer phlebotomists are generally trained under the same program as their state's hospital or clinical phlebotomists, but they do it under a highly compressed schedule, and some of the curriculum is cut.
That's because officers don't need to know how to draw blood from a foot or other difficult sites, or from an infant or medically fragile patient, said Nicole Watson, the College of Western Idaho phlebotomy instructor teaching the Idaho officers.
Instead, they are trained on the elbow crease, the forearm and the back of the hand. If none are accessible, they'll take the suspect to the hospital for testing.
In a nondescript Boise office building where the Nampa officers were trained, Dowell scanned his subject and prepared to draw blood. Chase Abston, an officer taking his turn playing a suspect, recoiled a bit, pressing his back deeper into the gray pleather chair.
Dowell slid a fine-gauge needle into the back of Abston's hand. Abston, who had been holding his breath, slowly exhaled as his blood began to flow.
All the officers seemed like they'd be more comfortable if their colleagues were wielding sidearms instead of syringes. But halfway through the second day of training, with about 10 venipunctures each under their belts, they relaxed enough to trade barbs alongside needle jabs.
They're making quick progress, Watson said. Their training will be complete after they have logged 75 successful blood draws.
Once they're back on patrol, they will draw blood of any suspected drunk driver who refuses a breath test. They'll use force if they need to, such as getting help from another officer to pin down a suspect and potentially strap them down, Watson said.
Though most legal experts agree blood tests measure blood alcohol more accurately than breath tests, Oberman said the tests can be fraught with problems, too.
Vials can be mixed up, preservative levels in the tubes used to collect the blood can be off, or the blood can be stored improperly, causing it to ferment and boosting the alcohol content.
Oberman said law enforcement agencies should also be concerned "about possible malpractice cases over somebody who was not properly trained."
Alan Haywood, Arizona's law enforcement phlebotomy coordinator who is directing the training programs in Idaho and Texas, said officers are exposed to some extra on-the-job risk if they draw blood, but that any concern is mitigated by good training and safe practices.
"If we can't get the evidence safely, we're not going to endanger the officers or the public to collect that evidence," he said.
The Phoenix Police Department only uses blood tests for impaired driving cases. Detective Kemp Layden, who oversees drug recognition, phlebotomy and field sobriety, said the city now has about 120 officers certified to draw blood. Typically, a suspect is brought to a precinct or mobile booking van for the blood draw.
Under the state's implied consent law, drivers who refuse to voluntarily submit to the test lose their license for a year, so most comply. For the approximately 5 percent who refuse, the officer obtains a search warrant from an on-call judge and the suspect can be restrained if needed to obtain a sample, Layden said.
Between 300 to 400 blood tests are done in an average month in the nation's fifth-largest city.
During holiday months that number can rise to 500, said Layden, who reviews each case to make sure legal procedures were followed.
Outside of Arizona, some law enforcement agencies in Utah have officer phlebotomists, and police in Dalworthington Gardens, Texas are cross-trained as paramedics and have been drawing blood for about three years. The NHTSA is in talks with Houston, Texas about doing the phlebotomy training there, he said.
They're all attracted by Arizona's anecdotal evidence.
"What we found was that the refusal rates of chemical testing lowered significantly since this program began," Haywood said. "Arizona we had about a 20 percent refusal rate in 1995, and today we see about an 8 to 9 percent refusal rate."
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Associated Press writer Bob Christie in Phoenix contributed to this report.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090913/ap_on_re_us/us_police_dui_blood/print
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Considering that the Red Cross has trouble finding my veins (I'm a chronic blood donor, I think I'm nearing 100 units donated), I would be VERY unhappy about having a cop or any other non-medical personnel mucking about my person with needles.
I also don't understand how any sane court could rule that they can't force you to breathe into a bag, but they can force you to have blood drawn by non-medical personnel.
One more state to avoid.
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Wow. That opens entire new avenues of potential abuse. "I didn't mean to stick him 20 or 30 times, just couldn't find the vein." "I didn't MEAN to tear the vein, he moved." Police officers as phlebotomists? Ah no. We're told to trust the professionals. That means a hospital, not a police officer, for jamming needles into citizens.
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Sounds like the police are dealing with one case with a hemophiliac or an HIV case away from a huge lawsuit. Good luck with that.
They might unnecessarily have a big fight on their hands if they encounter people with extreme aversions to needles- and these usually seem to be big guys for some reason.
And what exactly are the police going to do with this blood? Are they going to have their own lab (can't imagine any possibility of tampering or validation problems there), or are they going to take it to a hospital where there are people alreadyt here that are experts at drawing blood?
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AFAIK, it takes a court order or warrant to draw blood without consent. It's been a standard tactic for YEARS to lie and say "if you won't breathe into the breathalyzer, I can always just take a blood sample". 99% of the time, the person just breathes into the damn thing... =D
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Sounds like the police are dealing with one case with a hemophiliac or an HIV case away from a huge lawsuit.
Two words for ya brimic.
Qualified Immunity
Since the U.S. Suprime Court has upheld the this practice, Officer Friendly who bleeds out a hemophiliac in the excersise of his duties would be held blameless.
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When the state toughened the penalties for refusing the tests a few years ago, the problem lessened, but it's still the main reason that drunk driving cases go to trial in the Boise region, Starr said.
Can't have people exercising their 5th Amendment rights, now. Also, the 4th Amendment ought not to allow subjects be secure in their actual, flesh & blood persons. That would be crazy talk.
Better to make the penalty for exercising one's rights greater than the penalty for breaking the law.
Why am I rooting more for the drunks these days? I suspect they are less a threat in the long run than overbearing, self-aggrandizing, banal bureaucrats with firearms.
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Why am I rooting more for the drunks these days? I suspect they are less a threat in the long run than overbearing, self-aggrandizing, banal bureaucrats with firearms.
I think it might be because the anti-drunk driving crowd has gone off the deep end. They seem to feel that anything is or should be allowed to stop drunk drivers.
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Huh. Way back in the 80's when I was doing my paramedic training at Harborview in Seattle, I was working in the ER. The local police brought in a distinguished-looking middle-aged male in a suit and tie after he was involved in an accident. They suspected a DUI, so they brought him in for a blood draw. He was pleasant and lucid up until the time I put the Vacutainer needle into his antecubital fossa. He reared back and smashed my nose. He then disappeared under a sea of police uniforms as they subdued him and while I was gushing blood all over the trauma bay. It took a bit to sort out which blood came from where.
Having worked for a bit in a psych ward, I have seen just how many people it takes to subdue an angry, frightened, demented or psychotic individual. Pinning someone down for an involuntary blood draw is not going to be easy. Are they going to first taser or use a few baton blows across the joints to get them to submit?
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Non-medical personnel? Police officers as phlebotomists? Impossible? So what about the departments that require their officers to be fully trained Paramedics as well as Peace Officers? How is it possible to train them up to the the thousand+ hour training standard of a Paramedic, but impossible to train other officers for this one particular task?
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Non-medical personnel? Police officers as phlebotomists? Impossible? So what about the departments that require their officers to be fully trained Paramedics as well as Peace Officers? How is it possible to train them up to the the thousand+ hour training standard of a Paramedic, but impossible to train other officers for this one particular task?
No one is saying that police officers cannot do phlebotomy work. We're saying "It's a bad idea to allow the police to suck blood out of your body at their discretion in a field environment."
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The federal program's aim is to determine if blood draws by cops can be an effective tool against drunk drivers and aid in their prosecution.
Frankly, I think it might be easier to list the intrusions the federal government hasn't yet undertaken.
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Huh. Way back in the 80's when I was doing my paramedic training at Harborview in Seattle, I was working in the ER. The local police brought in a distinguished-looking middle-aged male in a suit and tie after he was involved in an accident. They suspected a DUI, so they brought him in for a blood draw. He was pleasant and lucid up until the time I put the Vacutainer needle into his antecubital fossa. He reared back and smashed my nose.
A smashed nose is a small price to pay for what you did. Hopefully, you've learned your lesson and don't perform involuntary invasive medical procedures on people any more.
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If the test comes up negative for DUI, does the officer have to dispose of the blood sample, or is there a possibility of the blood being kept for a DNA database?
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A smashed nose is a small price to pay for what you did. Hopefully, you've learned your lesson and don't perform involuntary invasive medical procedures on people any more.
And if they had a warrant? (which it is vastly probable that they did)
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If the test comes up negative for DUI, does the officer have to dispose of the blood sample, or is there a possibility of the blood being kept for a DNA database?
I was thinking that too
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Gattica!
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And if they had a warrant? (which it is vastly probable that they did)
Bingo! We have a winner! Thanks for playing, Hank!
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Alright, folks, let's take it easy here.
I didn't see anything about the blood being drawn under warrant, either.
We can do this thread sans snark and vitriol, really.
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They might unnecessarily have a big fight on their hands if they encounter people with extreme aversions to needles- and these usually seem to be big guys for some reason.
Strange that you mention this. I'm 6'2", 225 pounds of muscle, and I'll run like a hippie from soap at the sight of a needle. I'm not a violent person at all (unless you pose a threat to me and I have no way out), but if anyone pinned me down and tried to stick one in me, there'd be hell to pay. I'd feel remorse afterwards if I hurt anyone, but that's my phobia.
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Bingo! We have a winner! Thanks for playing, Hank!
Well, if they showed you the actual warrant (not a copy) we'll cut you some slack, since you were just following orders . . .
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Well, if they showed you the actual warrant (not a copy) we'll cut you some slack, since you were just following orders . . .
Are you implying that he still would have been wrong to draw blood even with a warrant for it?
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I think many people here would find this US Supreme Court decision of interest:
SCHMERBER v. CALIFORNIA, 384 U.S. 757 (1966)
Please note that this has been the law of the land since 1966.
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He was pleasant and lucid up until the time I put the Vacutainer needle into his antecubital fossa. He reared back and smashed my nose.
How entirely unexpected.
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Well, if they showed you the actual warrant (not a copy) we'll I'll cut you some slack, since you were just following orders . . .
We'll cut him some slack? FTFY. You seem to be the only one who has a problem with him following the law.
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Before the "sheeple" comments arrive...