Mentor Municipal Court Uses Eye Scanner to Detect Drugs

Probation officers at are going high tech to detect drug and alcohol abusers.

Mentor City Council approved a lease agreement that will allow officers to detect drugs with a pupillometer. The CSI-sounding device scans a person’s pupil, looking for evidence of drugs.

Council will pay $31,200 annually to lease the Passpoint system from Streetime Technologies in Connecticut.

The Passpoint eye scanning system, or pupillometer, can detect drugs from the distinct markings imprinted in the pupil. Different drugs leave different imprints in the eye’s pattern.

Mentor’s Chief Probation Office Sue Radovanic said the system will save time and money. Mentor averages 75 to 100 urinalysis tests every month. The scan, done in seconds, can detect any drug that affects the nervous system and then alerts probation officers if they need to demand a urine test from an offender.

“It will be a real time saver for defendants as well,’’ Radovanic said. “Some of them sit and wait several hours before they can take a urine test.’’

She said the eye scan will also help rule out unnecessary tests. She said as many as 70 percent of the urine tests come back negative.

Many of the drug tests require additional equipment and labor as well as lab costs.

A person ordered to stay free of alcohol and drugs would take a clean eye scan first to set the machine, she said. The scan resembles an ATM machine. When the person opens their eyes the machine can read the pupil and determine if drugs are present within seconds. The machine ends the scan with a beep and prints a thermal receipt that indicates if the person has take an additional urine test.

Radovanic said Mentor officers trained in December and this week they hosted Cleveland Municipal Court officials who are considering the system in their courts.

John Diamond of Streetime Technology, which markets the eye scan, told Mentor City officials in December that Dayton area court officials spent $20,000 annually on urine tests. Eighty percent of them were unnecessary, he said.

Radovanic said some offenders try to outsmart urine tests by either attempting to bring another’s urine or by adding “cleaners’’ to their urine to remove drug residue.

“With the eye scan they can’t disguise the drugs in their system,’’ Radovanic said.

The Passpoint pupillometer system operates out west in Arizona, California and Nevada courts. Mentor and Dayton area courts are among the first in Ohio to use it.