Loren Culp ran for Washington governor and lost by a huge margin.
Previous to that, he was police chief in the tiny town of Republic, Washington. His campaign ads milked that lofty status for all it was worth: Culp posed in police uniform with Karma, the town’s police dog. Ted Nugent (photo below) helped him get the dog.
After losing to Gov. Jay Inslee, 56%-43% (see results here), Culp sued Washington Secretary of State Kim Wyman, a Republican, alleging massive election fraud. Culp’s attorney withdrew the lawsuit when Attorney General Bob Ferguson warned the state would seek to recover its legal expenses from him and his client. (Court rules allow that.)
Culp is a certifiable crank. But this story doesn’t end there. His K-9 is a crook.
“As a drug detection dog, Karma kept his nose down and treated every suspect the same. Public records show that from the time he arrived in Republic in January 2018 until his handler took a leave of absence to campaign for public office in 2020, Karma gave an ‘alert’ indicating the presence of drugs 100 percent of the time during roadside sniffs outside vehicles.
“Whether drivers actually possessed illegal narcotics made no difference. The government gained access to every vehicle that Karma ever sniffed. He essentially created automatic probable cause for searches and seizures, undercutting constitutional guarantees of due process. … Overall, the police found drugs in 29 percent of the vehicles that Karma flagged during his time in Republic. …
“The real confirmation of the dog’s detective skills would have come from walking around a drug-free vehicle and not giving a trained final response. Karma failed this test every time. When he had a chance to stop the impound of an innocent owner’s vehicle, his success rate was zero percent.”
(Read story here.) For the drivers involved, this wasn’t funny. At least one sued Culp for violating her civil rights (read federal court filing here). Culp had already been sued by a child sex-abuse victim for threatening her with prosecution for filing a complaint (read that story here), and made waves by refusing to enforce a voter-passed gun control initiative (read about that here). In fact, it was the latter notoriety that set the stage for his quixotic foray into elective politics.
Returning to Culp’s drug-sniffing police dog, detecting drugs is often a prelude to seizing cars and cash under civil asset forfeiture laws, which have been widely abused especially by small-town police departments as a means of funding their operations by robbing innocent citizens to buy equipment and pay their own salaries. (See my previous postings about this shady practice here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.)
In Republic, the small-town police department had already shrunk from three officers to just Culp, and if there was any more shrinkage, he wouldn’t have a job. In fact, that happened. So Culp had a lot of incentive to keep his one-man police department going by developing its own funding source.
I’m not saying he did that, or used Karma to steal cars from visitors to the area, although from the news reports linked above, it’s clear that some of Karma’s victims paid thousands of dollars in impound fees, so somebody locally was racketeering with this dog’s nose. All I’m saying is Culp’s police dog is a lying, crooked, accessory to highway robbery.
Now someone should look into whether the dog illegally voted for Trump and Culp.