[blindlaw] Educating the police and obtaining White Cane /guide dog legal compliance

[Bruce E. Naccari]

On the topic of how one can best proceed to get enforcement of the rights of guide dog users and the White Cane laws:  	Many municipalities and states have Human rights Commissions or Human Relations Commissions with rather broad powers to enforce state or local antidiscrimination laws and to assess and then seek to achieve a conciliation of grievances involving discrimination complaints or complaints of poor relations between or among groups in the population. If your locality or state has such an agency, anyone with a grievance involving police failure or business or public accommodation operators’ failures to enforce and/or comply with the White Cane laws and laws protecting the right to use service animals like guide dogs should in my opinion consider filing a complaint there. Because these agencies usually are charged with a duty to  try  to achieve an amicable conciliation of the complaint before a hearing can be held,  their procedures are useful for achieving results in cases of deprivation of rights with no or low special damages in dollars and where litigation would be lengthy and a judge with the discretion to do so might not grant adequate  attorney’s fees.  While I served first as Legal Counsel to the New Orleans Commission and then later as a commissioner we successfully  conciliated several complaints  against restaurants, bars, taxi companies, etc., involving the exclusion of guide dogs and discrimination against blind   customers. In my opinion getting such a commission to become your advocate with the local police will likely prove to be more fruitful than filing Internal Affairs Division/public Integrity Division complaints with eh police department.  Police tend to stiffen and back each other when a complaint is filed against one of their  own but will often respond amicably and cooperatively to conciliatory procedures which seem less like an attack. And if there is a local or state Commission of this sort I would contact it to ask it  in a formal petition to  ensure that Police Officer Standard Training  classes and/or Police Academy classes in your jurisdiction are getting adequate education about the White Cane laws and the pertinent antidiscrimination laws and  about the rights of cane and service animal users. I will leave it to the wisdom of the NFB’s government relations staff and lobbyists to decide if it would be worth the  time and effort to draft model amendments to the pertinent laws that would if enacted explicitly require  POST an similar training of law enforcement officers to  include formal instruction in this area and to require that applicants for driver’s licenses when tested show familiarity with the White Cane safety laws.