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Supreme Court Hearing Case On Drug-Sniffing Dog "Fishing Expeditions"
sgunhouse writes "Wired is running an article on a Supreme Court challenge (well, actually two of them) to the use of drug-sniffing dogs. The first case discussed involved Florida police using a drug-sniffing dog as a basis for searching a suspected drug dealer's home. The court in Florida excluded the evidence obtained from the search, saying a warrant should be required for that sort of use of a dog. Personally, I agree — police have no right to parade a dog around on private property on a 'fishing expedition', same as they need a warrant to use a thermal imaging device to search for grow houses. I have no use for recreational drugs, but they had better have a warrant if they want to bring a dog onto my property."
we have no use for fishing expedtions and it is a massive privacy invasion. police should be reactive and deal with imminent threats, not go fishing for pot smokers. god damn police state.
Can I light a sig ?
The Supreme Court on Wednesday is set to hold oral arguments concerning the novel question of whether judges may issue search warrants for private residences when a drug-sniffing dog outside the home reacts as if it smells drugs inside.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Shoot 'em.
Defend your castle if they don't leave when asked.
Really? I see you are right, but that does sound strange to me, living in the Netherlands. Here it's a standard way for the police to track down the growers (even though selling small quantities is half-legal here).
I've often wondered about this sort of thing. I imagine that a dog could probably identify the house from the road. If you live in an apartment and the landlord lets the cops into the halls with the dog. Identify the apartments with pot, and get a warrant for search of that apartment. I, as a person with a not so keen sense of smell, can tell you which apartments have pot in them if you walk by at the right time of day.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
The thing is, dogs are eager to please. You dont even have to try to train them to alert whenever their handler is suspicious - they do that naturally. So the way this works is, the cop's 'gut' isnt sufficient to get a warrant, he needs some evidence not just a hunch. So he just gets the dog, who naturally picks up on the handlers state of mind and will alert as a result, neatly giving that initial hunch credibility and transforming it into 'evidence' which can justify a search.
It's a neat solution to those for whom the Constitution and the fundamentals of our legal system are 'problems' I suppose. Now the only question is whether the Supremes will give this workaround their stamp of approval immediately or send it back down the ranks for some tweaking.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
It's not grey area, if the cops are trespassing on your property to make use of the dogs, why not let them go all the way around the house and peer in your windows? It's one thing to look through windows from a publicly accessible vantage point, and quite another to trespass in order to peer in.
Seriously, and cops come onto your property with a dog, and don't have a warrant, what are you going to do? If you shoot them, they'll shoot you. If you sue them, you'll lose. If you put up with it it, well, that's what you'll have to do.
It's rigged against you. Everything is. In Britain (at least England & Wales) a cop has never been found guilty of illegally killing someone during the course of their job. So, if you want a license to kill, just join an English police force. But in most other places (including the USA and Australia), cops also literally get away with murder.
And you think that a little bit of searching without a warrant is going to bother them? Even if the case against a suspect is thrown out because the evidence was collected illegally, the filth involved will not have any sanctions against them. Think about that. They can bust down your door, shoot your dog, and plant drugs, with no repercussions.
And no use for recreational drugs? So no alcohol? You don't smoke a ciggie every now and again? Or a pipe or a cigar? (Personally I don't use illegal drugs, but that's only 'cause I'm too lazy to seek them out. If they were on sale down at the local bottlo along with the whisky, brandy and fine liqueurs I'd buy some.)
HELP MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN HACKED BY AN ILLIBERAL ART STUDENT SET TO DESTROY THE INTERWEBZ!
As much as I find it hard to motivate myself to defend the police, it isn't up to them to set the law or decide which laws they decide to enforce. Your government, and the general population, deserve the blame for anything wrong with that.
As to whether getting a warrant based on a sniffer dog is right. It really is hard to say; personally I think there should be a standard of a reasonable expectation of privacy but that becomes very hard to define. If a police officer overheard a conversation about bomb making through an open window when passing should it not be investigated? How about a large quantity of peroxide bottles left next to a bin visible at the side of the house. If a dog trained to detect explosives goes batshit crazy outside of a house should it be ignored? Most people accept that things that can be seen or heard from public property aren't private; how about if they are only visible/audible if using advanced equipment and manipulation (to for example filter sound). Is a smell emanating from a property supposed to be ignored? I doubt the police officer who ignored a strong burning smell and left someone to die would be praised.
If the police are already in the house, searching, do they not need a warrant for that or were they invited in? If there is reasonable doubt why should the police not be perfectly within their rights to use a dog with a nose for drugs? after all, these dogs get it right the vast majority of the times. This was not some draconian misuse of power. the police were not abusing some guy because they thought he had a joint. A suspected drug dealer it says. Turns out he is a drug dealer that is now trying his best to get off on a technicality. Police also use sniffer dogs in public places to search for bombs as well as drugs and really, most of them give a great public service for yous and mine.
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
Who said anything about trespassing? The dogs can smell shit from outside your property.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Having an animal that's just as likely to get excited about smelling my butthole and crotch become an authoritarian figure in any kind of a crime investigation is simply ridiculous.
The defendants should also be allowed to put the dog on the witness stand.
Exactly.
Dogs with a human handler are too open to abuse. The handler may intentionally or unintentionally signal the dog, so it then indicates, and they then have permission to do a search. If a dog cannot be calibrated, and the accuracy known, it should not be used for law enforcement.
-- Braden's law of data: All data spends some of its lifetime in an excel spreadsheet.
the question is not if the dog can smell the pot, is how to prove that it is actually reacting to having smelled the pot or just faking it reacting to its handler subliminal commands.
In almost every jurisdiction in the US, the police were bound in their arrest and use of force powers to what the legislature authorized. Anything outside of that was kidnapping and/or illegal use of force up to murder. Citizens could lawfully shoot dead a cop who came onto their property, broke the 4th amendment and then began to wave their firearm at the homeowner who ordered them off their property.
But then the same forces that have been trying to eradicate private firearm ownership in the anglosphere decided that it would be better to have private citizens have **only** the theoretical protection of the courts than any right to use force to defend themselves from criminal acts by the police. Those of us who aren't stupid know that this invariably means that the citizen will be defending themselves from trumped up charges, not getting the cop held responsible.
I, as a person with a not so keen sense of smell, can tell you which apartments have pot in them if you walk by at the right time of day.
You don't have to hide it. On the internet no one knows you're a dog.
The dogs are trained to give the alert signal on a visual cue from their handler. This is not reasonable evidence that a crime has been committed. It is delegating the grave responsibility of violating a citizen's right to be protected from unwarranted search and seizure from a trained and responsible judge acting on sworn statements of an officer of the court to a dog trained to respond on cue. We may as well shred the fourth amendment.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Or the wind blowing in the opposite direction, or any of a number of things.
As with polygraph, it can be misused by misinterpreting the dog, accidentally or deliberately.
Also, just as with IR cameras, which are passive, too, it should be forbidden to government by a free people sans warrant.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Yeah, a hippie I know cleans his pipes in alcohol. This leaves an incredibly odoriferous sludge, extract of burnt pot smell, condensed yuck.
Then he drips it around the neighborhood for blocks around just for the drug dogs. He did the courthouse area once for a joke too. I don't know how long this stuff lasts, but I would imagine a dog could smell it for months. Peeeeeyouuuuuu!
Who said anything about trespassing? The dogs can smell shit from outside your property.
Studies show that the dog is more likely to react on the handlers behaviour than the actual scent.
This is not really that different than a police officer going to a fortune teller to get a basis for a warrant. Just like the dog, the fortune teller will try to pick up some clue from the police officer of what kind of response he expects and respond accordingly.
Yes, you will get a lot of correct positives, just like you get with a trained dog. You will also get a lot of false positives, just like you get from a trained dog. (Considering that drug sniffing dogs have more than 50% false positives it is not unlikely that the fortune teller will be better at picking up when the police officer is acting out of racism or some other BS than an actual hunch and provide a more accurate result.)
How does an elevated IR signature indicate probable cause that a grow operation is happening? There are thousands of legitimate reasons to keep a house warm, and in fact many people do prefer a warmer home.
I keep my house at 85F in the winter. I suffer from disabling Raynaud's phenomenon and keeping my home warm is the only way for me to function.
Why should I suffer the risk of having a SWAT team barge into my house in the middle of the night because they think I'm keeping my house too warm?
Probable cause means the TOTALITY OF CIRCUMSTANCES would lead a reasonable person to conclude that criminal activity is actually taking place. It does not mean "let's find any excuse we can to barge into someone's house in the middle of the night, shoot their dogs (or their children), and play pretend soldier of freedom."
Totality of circumstances means a hell of a lot more than simply measuring the temperature inside the house (where, by the way, there is every expectation of privacy).
In the rest of the world, justice comes before anything else. No matter how evidence is obtained, it is still evidence, and will be used in court.
In the US, if an unskilled policeman makes a small mistake, all evidence will be thrown down the sink, and the criminals who would be convicted on that evidence in every other country of the world, will walk free. I don't understand this protection of people where there is evidence that they are criminals.
"Then he drips it around the neighborhood for blocks around just for the drug dogs."
I always take mine when I go to the airport to get somebody, I drip it on the carpet at the main entry, so there will be many false positives if they use a dog.
You mean the "Clever Hans" effect where the handler provides the cues instead of the smell? It's a know issue, both handlers and dogs are trained to try and avoid it.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
Yeah, no. Not a biker, gangster, druggy or idiot here and I want the cops as removed from my presence as possible. If some cop with bad "evidence" claims I'm distributing drugs the ATF can come in, seize all my assets and auction them off (while barring myself or anyone I know from bidding on them) all before I go to trial. I don't want to be anywhere near that mess so I'd rather the cops need more than just "oh, his house was warm" or "the dog smelled something" before that happens.
But not very well, it would appear: http://www.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/welcome/features/2010-2011/02/20110223_drug_dogs.html
Are you assuming the handler wants to avoid it?
"Cursed is he who rises early in the morning..." Isiah 5:11
That rule is pretty effective because it uses the motivations of the police (to get the bad guys) to keep thrn from violating the rights of citizens. There are a few bad cops, of course, but 99% are careful to not do an illegal search precisely because they want the evidence to be admissable. Cops and DAs don't talk about what's right and wrong, they are careful about what's admissable and what's not.
The dogs are entirely capable of alerting based not on the presence of anything illegal but based on it's handlers desire that it do so. One of the issues under consideration is exactly how accurate does a dog need to be to generate probable cause: police don't often record false positives, so there is no way of knowing if the dogs alert is evidence of anything other than the handlers state of mind.
"Cursed is he who rises early in the morning..." Isiah 5:11
I might have agreed with you until two years ago. That's when a cop who was having a bad week decided that his dog thought he smelled something in my car. After being drtained for two hours in freezing rain as the cop dug all through my car, nothing was found because I don't do drugs. Speaking to the cop two months later, it was clear that the cop, not the dog, decided that he wanted to search my car. Noone could ever prove that because the dog can't testify about what they smelled, or didn't smell. Courts just have the cop's word on how he interpreted the dog's actions.
You can try and invent imaginary rights and legal rulings to justify drug use, but at the end of the day, it's dumb.
I would need a lot of convincing to understand why the police would need to get PERMISSION to use IR gear in public to find grow houses (as if the IR signature of your house has some kind of right to privacy): they do it all the time in the UK, and only bikers, gangsters, druggies and idiots would have a problem with it.
First off: All Right Are Imaginary. They're fairly arbitrary as well. Fuck your perception of which "rights" others should have. This is about wasting money on pointless witch-hunts to me. I want them to get a permit before they spend my tax money to fly their helicopters at night over my house while they're distracted by thermal imaging. That permit needs to be issued by a judge after considering evidence that warrants the investigation, not green-lighted based on a whim.
Furthermore: Alcohol is a Drug. Now, let's recall Prohibition. The laws against alcohol made it possible for Mobs to make mad cash. When's the last time you bought booze from a gangster? It's not profitable for them to sell it... It doesn't take a brain scientist to figure out that laws against the substances that the general public find acceptable for recreational use create a big problem.
The government doesn't want to end the war on drugs. The War on Terror will never end either. They want the power to do whatever the fuck they want -- Which means turning your country into a Dystopia like the old USSR. See also: Homeland Security & TSA. Blindly trusting your government to use restraint with absolute power is fucking moronic.
The DOD does this, because they can on a base. Anyway when the US was still stationed in Panama someone would go get a $5 bag of coke from the taxi drivers and put it in floor wax. It was hilarious to watch the dog start barking at the floor and the MP’s would just give up and do the search the old fashioned way by going through all 250 soldiers’ stuff.
I have no use for recreational drugs
Why do we feel compelled to pre-emptively deny allegations? Why do absolute shits feel compelled make false allegations? Why do we let us be fooled by false allegations? Even geeks -the ones seeking facts or accepting them anyway- are sometimes fooled by false allegations...
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Congratulations, this must be one of the more ignorant comments I have seen on Slashdot in a long while.
Dogs have an almost insanely good sense of smell. For a dog to smell a bag of narcotics is about as hard as for you to smell if somebody opened a bottle of ammonia under your nose. The big problem is getting the smell out of your nose.
Training a drug sniffing (or any type of ID dog) involves teaching the dog first to identify a number of substances and then "mark" them. Marking is typically done either by the dog freezing and pointing with the nose, or sitting down. For a dog to be qualified you have a number of tests. Tests here involves the dog having to search 12 people, some of whom who may carry narcotics. Those not carrying narcotics get identical objects to hide on their persons. The handler, and the person holding the object, does not know if it is the real deal or not until after the test. If the dog misses a person, or marks the wrong person, it, and the handler, fails to qualify. And, yes, it's not unusual with a lineup where nobody carries anything.
A similar test often used is when a luggage band at an airport, where the dog must mark the specific bags containing explosives or narcotics. So the dogs and handlers certainly have to prove that they are able both to identify the substance and and that they know when it's not there.
Dogs are not infallible.They get tired, bored and exhausted just like their handlers. But it's not just a matter of a 'trained' officer having an 'opinion' about if the dog found something.
Cops NEVER get fired. NEVER. Not unless there is a ton of publicity and the mayor is forced to demand it. You cant get fired from the worlds largest gang.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You mean the "Clever Hans" effect where the handler provides the cues instead of the smell? It's a know issue, both handlers and dogs are trained to try and avoid it.
Oh, they are trained for it alright. The problem is, the pigs actually follow that training.
You have the internet, go look up some of the anecdotal stories of people watching the pigs sniff around their cars at a traffic stop for mounds of first impressions "gee, it sorta looked like the handler ordered the dog to signal", for the pigs to then find nothing after turning out and partially destroying the contents of the car.
It's easy, you smell someone smoking pot, and look for the guy puffing away on his fatty sitting on the front porch. Some days at the grocery store I almost get a contact high from the potheads on a munchy run.
Wait, I'm being insensitive... The "medical patients" who are taking their "medication".
I don't want pot to be illegal, but it needs to be regulated like alcohol. If you go to the store drunk as hell it is as rude as going there completely baked, and you have a major problem if you do that.
I just wish the stupid republicans would stop being turd sandwiches and just make it legal and wrap it into the Tobacco and Alcohol rules.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Since I don't do illegal recreational drugs, I don't need to justify it and I don't care if the idiots who do justify it or not. Whether or not cops get to stomp around my home tearing the place apart because fido scratched its ear (or officer plod says fido scratched its ear) is a whole 'nother question.
"Cursed is he who rises early in the morning..." Isiah 5:11
Also consider:
Airport shuttle seats, taxi seats
School busses (often they are parked together somewhere and the windows negligently left open)
Police vehicles (a bit risky to pull off)
The soap supply barrel at the car wash, or those big turning brushes at the car wash
etc.
The whole world should smell like pot!
Dogs are so endlessly fascinated with each other, the drug sniffers would be too enthralled and distracted to find anything ;)
Joking aside, the court should most definitely conclude that such unwarranted searches are unconstitutional. It may be an extremely small victory, but it's a start.
If you aren't doing anything illegal, you have nothing to worry about
If you aren't doing anything illegal and the present and all future authorities are completely benign and the present and all future authorities never make mistakes, you have nothing to worry about..
Worried yet?
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Based on an initial read, this sounds like a question of curtilage, although I didn't see that term in the article.
Curtilage is the legal definition of what part of your property is private, and what is not. If the dog was not on a public street, then this is a curtilage case.
My understanding of recent SCOTUS cases is that they view curtilage in a way that, shall we say, is more favorable to the way the rich typically live than the poor. If you have a fence around your property, with a gate, then the whole property is your curtilage, and the police should keep out. If not, then anything in your front yard, at least, may be fair game as the police can walk right up to your door.
This is entirely separate from my belief that police dogs react to whatever their handlers want them to react to.
Note : IANAL and this is certainly not legal advice.
The argument I heard on NPR over this was if there is a difference between getting pulled over and being subjected to a K-9 search, or owning private property and having them subject you to a K-9 search.
One (and I sure the idiots on the court panels have argued) that your car is on public property (highway, local roads) and can be subject to searches whether you agree to it or not, but your car is private property.Something that has always pissed me off is how road blocks and searches can be considered legal, when the drive has done nothing illegal, IE, weaving all over the road, failing to obey traffic devices is a reason to pull a driver over.
Two your home/physical land/property is private and unless they have a warrant to even be on your property to begin with you should not have to live in fear of whether you are doing anything that should even be considered illegal, and the search warrant is (usually) based a particle item, or items based on the crime/charges they have brought in front of a judge, so anything they find outside that cannot be used.
So no neither one should be legal, but one is and it looks like the other one will soon become legal. SO for those of you that will feel that we live in a free country, according to the constitution you have the right to do with your body as you please, for those that choose to live "within some of the dumb laws" that is your choice and it should be that way, but do not start to bitch and whine when you are accidentally invaded by law enforcement and have done nothing wrong. Altho it really is not in your control to allow, or reject these kinds of laws, or how they get misused. I am sure you will sit there and use that go out and vote bullshit, but name any office official who has called out law enforcement for abusing privacy, outside racism or some regular Jane/Joe..
Wait isn't the president a democrat? Has he recommended legalizing medical marijuana? Did harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi bring this to the floors for a vote when they had a majority?
How about the head of the DEA? She looks like shes on drugs.
Yes, it's just the stupid republicans.
Except it shouldn't matter if I'm doing anything illegal as long as I'm in my home not hurting anyone. Just leave the people alone. If you promise not to wander around my property with a dog, I promise not to fill your and your dogs eyes full of mace. Fair?
>I would need a lot of convincing to understand why the police would need to get PERMISSION to use IR gear in public to find grow houses (as if the IR signature of your house has some kind of right to privacy): they do it all the time in the UK, and only bikers, gangsters, druggies and idiots would have a problem with it.
And people like me, who do not particularly want the cops to watch my silhouette fucking my fiance doggy style through the wall.
If I want to be watched, I leave the curtains open. If they're closed, then no they do NOT have the right to use technology that can see through my walls and detect heated areas (like bodies -especially bodies that are engaged in coitus).
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
In Colorado, a legalization measure is on the ballot. The Democratic current governor and the Republican former governor are doing ads together to oppose legalization. Tom Tancredo, a libertarian and otherwise nuts, is about the only high-profile politician on record as supporting it.
You might find this story interesting.
The issue isn't qualifying, it's super-qualifying. I have to tie a figure 8 to get belay certified to climb. I can tie the superior Yosemite Bowline (the Figure 8 is a VERY good knot; it does tend to stick if stressed, the Yosemite doesn't and holds just as well if not better--standard Bowline is a death trap).
Dog and handler can successfully pass a test that the dog and handler are neutral in. The handler, looking displeased and suspicious at a kid who isn't some double-blind in a line-up, could signal the dog anyway. He could do so intentionally.
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And don't forget, dog can be very tasty. I understand that it's legal to hunt on your own property...
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
These dogs are trained to fined drugs, but they're also trained with commands that can make them give a false positive anytime the cop feels like screwing around with you. If the signal for "There are some drugs in here" is a bark and a slap of the paw, the dog can easily be trained to exhibit that behavior with a simple verbal command of the handler.
Allowing this BS to stand is effectively the same as allowing arbitrary search.
In an ideal world this would be flamebait.
Unfortunately, it's not even insightful as we're all completely aware of this and no longer even stop and think "bloody hell, he's right".
A couple of years ago I was sitting in an airport on a long layover with a couple of hours before my connecting flight. It was later in the evening and the airport was fairly empty.
Down the hallway came two police officers with a dog (German Shepard). They stopped some way back and one of them approached me. He asked if they could use me as a test, to see if the dog would hit on my luggage. Specifically, he had something that looked like a dog chew toy that he wanted to set just behind my suitcase to see if the dog would catch it as he walked past.
I agreed but asked him if he wanted to up the game a bit. He looked quizzical until I smiled and pulled the bacon cheeseburger out of the bag I had sitting next to me, unwrapped it and put it on top of my suitcase.
He laughed, but said the department couldn't be responsible for the safety and welfare of my dinner.
To my surprise, the dog not only "hit", but successfully pulled the chew toy out from behind my suitcase. The office was quite proud of his dog. But when he praised the dog and said "treat" (or whatever it was), the dog misinterpreted. Instead of nibbling whatever the officer was trying to hand him, the dog lunged and made my bacon cheeseburger disappear in about half-a-second flat.
Dogs will be dogs.
The question remained, though, whether the dog's attention was drawn over to me because of the handler's nudging in my direction, honestly detecting the "chew toy" bait, or the bacon cheeseburger. I'll say this, the dog's eyes were riveted on my sandwich as soon as he saw it.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
They have also been shown to react to their handler's belief about whether there is contraband present. That is, if there is contraband present, the dog will probably detect it if the dog is within range. However, there is a significant possibility that if the handler believes that there is contraband present the dog will "detect" it as well.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
A similar test often used is when a luggage band at an airport, where the dog must mark the specific bags containing explosives or narcotics. So the dogs and handlers certainly have to prove that they are able both to identify the substance and and that they know when it's not there.
That's all well and good in a training situation, but in the real world dogs learn how to please their handlers. Dogs are smart enough to fake a tell when their master really wants a search. We can see that this is true, because drug dog accuracy varies as a function of the suspect's race.
So take your "ignorant" comment and shove it up your ass, bootlicker. In actual practice, a K9 unit is a blank warrant to search anyone.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Much like homoeopaths are trained to avoid the placebo effect?
As long as they don't send the dogs in alone without communicating with them, I don't think they can get away from the effect being attributable to the handler.
Thanks for posting that, as I was reading comments I clearly remembered reading studies on dog based detection and particularly the ones talked about here (lol only 21 of 144 walkthroughs successfully detected nothing, with the rest generating an average of around 2 false positives per search!)
These numbers say to me that these dogs are little more than props which give excuses. A sort of dowsing rod for drugs.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
Gonna get a badge and use the IR goggles to spy on your girlfriend naked in the shower...
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only bikers, gangsters, druggies and idiots would have a problem with it.
I live in the UK, am none of the above and I do have a problem with it. Only a nazi bootlicker would think it's OK.
(see what I did there?)
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I would need a lot of convincing to understand why the government has any sort of legitimate state interest in controlling one of the most harmless pharmacologically active substances ever discovered. Either we're all free or we're not. If they can take away my right to persue happiness, they can take yours away too. Which side are you on, freedom or authority?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
An illustrative case: Seattle Policeman Ian Birk approaches a 50-year-old man named John T Williams in broad daylight on a public street. Williams' crime? Carrying a woodcarving knife, shuffling along and minding his own business. No witness other than Birk thought Williams presented any kind of threat. Birk spends approximately 3-4 seconds yelling at Williams to drop the knife (never identifying himself as police), then shoots Williams 4 times in the back from about 15 feet away as the mostly deaf Williams had stopped to try to figure out what was going on.
In the aftermath, Birk was cleared of all charges. However, after lots of public outcry and the police department saying that he violated regulations, Birk decided to quit.
I am officially gone from
'course you could assume with equal validity that the police are going to beat a confession out of people. And then go for a citizens arrest.
I, as a person with a not so keen sense of smell, can tell you which apartments have pot in them if you walk by at the right time of day.
You don't have to hide it. On the internet no one knows you're a dog.
Is it just me, or have you just made a statement AND refuted it at the same time by making it? Bravo, sir!
Ezekiel 23:20
I think you may have watched one too many early episode of CSI. Thermal imaging would not show such a silhouette - unless, of course, the wall were very thin and you and/or your fiance were pressed against that wall. Thermal imaging can only show radiant heat. The reason they can detect grow rooms, thus, is because those rooms tend to be rather warm right on through to the brickwork. They wouldn't be able to see the exact location of a lamp (but if close to the roof they might see a localized heat bloom), or how many plants are there and what size, etc.
The closest you're going to get with seeing through walls is either via an xray device (good luck fitting one over your house, unless your house is a container and they can just run you through one at the nearest major naval port) or via radar - which is still a bulky set-up, in practice needs to be pressed up against the wall (so that the other side may function as the emitter), and the resolution at this time is barely good enough for potential military use where they care more about whether there's anything moving inside than their exact location and whether that movement is the missionary position or something else.
Additional problems arise from reasonable expectation and just how reasonable that is. For example, you may believe you have a reasonable expectation that having a grow room is a private thing since it is inside your home. Except that this grow room is going to radiate heat outward, well beyond the boundaries of your private property. But you may still have a reasonable expectation that people cannot see this. On the other hand, FLIR devices are not outside the reach of consumers. I could pick a good one up now for a few thousand - budgetary wise not different from somebody buying a DSLR and a few quality lenses. Assume every cell phone from 2020 onward actually has this as a feature - then what reasonable expectation of privacy regarding the thermal emissions of walls on your house do you believe to have left?
To bring that a step further - say everybody and their dog (yeah, I went there) could, in fact, look through your walls and admire you and your fiance's silhouettes - do you still believe that 'curtains closed' would be a solid legal basis for indicting those who watch you through those walls and precluding authorities from doing so unless they had a warrant?
In another posting on wifi you suggested that open wifi is free for anybody to receive no matter how 'private' one believes it to be, and to encrypt wifi if they're not cool with that. This doesn't preclude reception, of course, and depending on the level of encryption may be entirely moot. But within the aforementioned context, would you then suggest couples to encrypt their coitus?
Entering private land without a a lawful excuse is Trespass, someone delivering to your house, or visiting is implicitly given access
If you aren't doing anything illegal you are probably dead, you would be amazed what is illegal ....
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
In an ideal world, cops would hold true to their oath to "serve and protect the public".
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
"Marking is typically done either by the dog freezing and pointing with the nose, or sitting down."
Behavior that could be taught as a trained response to any number of stimuli, including a voice command. The point being that officer friendly could trigger that same response with or without drugs being present.
"it's not just a matter of a 'trained' officer having an 'opinion' about if the dog found something."
You can't cross-examine the dog, so it is entirely a matter of the officer interpreting the dog's response.
So if a house in your neighbourhood had a grow op and the police did an IR "flyby" they might find 6 other houses with elevated heat signatures. You would be OK with them raiding those houses as well - without a warrant or any other probable cause?
They guy the with indoor pool, the old folks with their thermostat cranked, the guy working in his garage all night, the house party full of people ... there are hundreds of reasons why a house would have elevated heat signatures. You wouldn't mind having a SWAT team crashing down your door because they noticed the temperature of your house was hotter than your neighbours???? Really??
These dogs, most German Shepherds, are effectively weapons being brandished around one's property. Doesn't Florida have applicable Stand Your Ground or Homestead laws for this sort of thing?
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
> Thermal imaging would not show such a silhouette - unless, of course, the wall were very thin
Like you mean my 3mX3m glass sliding door onto my streetfacing patio - which gives a view right to the opposite side of my house, unless the curtain is drawn.
Last I checked... a curtain is pretty damn "thin" for a wall - but blocks visible-spectrum light quite adequately.
The degree of detail is not materially important. The reality is that anybody making any effort to discern what happens in my house whatsoever without having previously established (and convinced a judge off) probable cause IS violating my rights.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
While granted, the results of such imaging isn't visible to the naked eye... detecting non-visible radiation coming from something does not involve subjecting it to anything more than a completely passive examination that can be done *ENTIRELY* externally, and does not amount to any sort of direct observation of the contents or actual activities on private property.
One should still need a warrant to physically search the place, however.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
>In another posting on wifi you suggested that open wifi is free for anybody to receive no matter how 'private' one believes it to be, and to encrypt wifi if they're not cool with that. This doesn't preclude reception, of course, and depending on the level of encryption may be entirely moot. But within the aforementioned context, would you then suggest couples to encrypt their coitus?
I'm pretty sure you got me confused with another poster here. I saw the EFF story but haven't even read it yet, let alone posted on it - if I'd said something like this in a different context (not impossible I guess) then it was a very long time ago...
That said... the idea of encrypted coitus is intriguing... disturbing but intriguing...
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
In the immortal words of Mike Lange... "Get that dog off my lawn..."
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
A dogs reaction is not evidence, its opinion. Evidence should be required to violate someones privacy. Using a dog as a tool to locate the drugs once a warrant has been issued, i totally support it.
If you go to the store drunk as hell it is as rude as going there completely baked, and you have a major problem if you do that.
At least in my state (Florida) there are laws against public intoxication. While the law does specifically make it illegal to be actually drinking in public, it does not specifically limit based on substance consumed. Here's a link: http://www.leg.state.fl.us/statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Display_Statute&Search_String=&URL=0800-0899/0856/Sections/0856.011.html
856.011Disorderly intoxication.—
(1)No person in the state shall be intoxicated and endanger the safety of another person or property, and no person in the state shall be intoxicated or drink any alcoholic beverage in a public place or in or upon any public conveyance and cause a public disturbance.
(2)Any person violating the provisions of this section shall be guilty of a misdemeanor of the second degree, punishable as provided in s. 775.082 or s. 775.083.
(3)Any person who shall have been convicted or have forfeited collateral under the provisions of subsection (1) three times in the preceding 12 months shall be deemed a habitual offender and may be committed by the court to an appropriate treatment resource for a period of not more than 60 days. Any peace officer, in lieu of incarcerating an intoxicated person for violation of subsection (1), may take or send the intoxicated person to her or his home or to a public or private health facility, and the law enforcement officer may take reasonable measures to ascertain the commercial transportation used for such purposes is paid for by such person in advance. Any law enforcement officers so acting shall be considered as carrying out their official duty.
History.—s. 16A, ch. 71-132; s. 1383, ch. 97-102.
I think it's one of the better laws on the books. It bans a disruptive behavior yet leaves some discretion to handle it in a reasonable manner. Usually when I read a law I say "Wow, that's messed up!" and move on.
I think they should start the testing with the cops' houses. I'm sure after a few false hits on Officer Hardass' front lawn they will reconsider this 'tactic'.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
How can you shred something which was already destroyed via the "USA PATRIOT Act"?
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You are somewhat right. The Florida case doesn't actually deal with issues of "standing outside someone's property", though. The dog was lead to the defendant's front door and alerted after sniffing it. So there is an issue of whether police can lead an animal on to someone's property to sniff without a warrant, which I would argue they should no be allowed to do.
Obviously a police officer standing in a public area who sees something that amounts to probable cause can act on it. I don't really see why a police officer with a dog in a public area shouldn't be treated the same way. I do think that when it comes time to trial the prosecution should have to give evidence showing the dog's and handler's training and I think police departments should have to keep record of the dog's and handler's track records (false positives versus actual finds). From that a judge should determine whether evidence gained through their work is admissable. A legislative framework from each state outlining what kind of training and tack record should be considered reliable would go a long way towards making that determination easier.
You can compare the use of drug sniffing dogs to the use of devices but I would not compare dogs to infrared sensors; I'd compare them to something like binoculars. In a way, a dog enhances a police officer's sense of smell by proxy. Likewise, binoculars enhance a police officers sight whereas infrared sensors allow officers to see heat, which they cannot naturally do.
Marijuana resin is much like rubber resin after burning. It is incredibly sticky and easily penetrates and stains porous material. Alcohol is one of the best solvents of this stuff that I have found, and makes it almost liquid in the right proportions.
Depending on the material, it might be downright permanent if you get this stuff on it.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
Sort of. It's still a grey area, though. Consider people who are growing marijuana in their houses. That's detectable from outside just by looking at the house from the air if you happen to have eyes (cameras) that see infrared. That has apparently been ruled not acceptable. Similarly, if the police hear you committing a crime in your house, you should expect them to bust down the door in short order, but it's probably well out of bounds for the police to start pointing laser mics at everyone's windows just in case.
Maybe the problem is that they think the dogs are trained to smell drugs, when they just smell pigs. It's no surprise that the the dogs always happen to detect drugs when the cops are with them.
Correlated? Causal? Who knows.
I'm a satanic clam.
One only hopes the "pigs" ignore you when you call 911 when someone is breaking into your house.
So they can show up 20 minutes too late? No thanks.
If you're smart, the only reason you would need to call 911 after a break in is to let them know where to come pick up the bodies.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
That is one of the issues in the Florida case; the dog was lead to the defendant's front door and certainly not with the defendant's permission. It isn't mentioned specifically in the Wired article but it is in this Reuters article:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/10/28/us-usa-court-dog-sniffs-idUSBRE89R06720121028
I wouldn't take the time to call the pigs if someone was breaking into my house, at least not until the thread is neutralized. Sure as hell didn't last time. I called Smith and Wesson, and they were ready in under a second.
An illustrative case: Seattle Policeman Ian Birk approaches a 50-year-old man named John T Williams in broad daylight on a public street. Williams' crime? Carrying a woodcarving knife, shuffling along and minding his own business. No witness other than Birk thought Williams presented any kind of threat. Birk spends approximately 3-4 seconds yelling at Williams to drop the knife (never identifying himself as police), then shoots Williams 4 times in the back from about 15 feet away as the mostly deaf Williams had stopped to try to figure out what was going on.
In the aftermath, Birk was cleared of all charges. However, after lots of public outcry and the police department saying that he violated regulations, Birk decided to quit.
A better case for the re-emergence of lynch mobs, I have not heard.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Yes, one could only hope: http://www.copblock.org/23079/andrew-messina-did-he-have-to-die/
Really? Didn't seem like it when I was getting back off my honeymoon. I wasn't searched, but the the cop at the airport really wanted "snoopy" to investigate me further.
I will say that I am sure that I stood out from the crowd. Hair bleached from 2 years of Mexico sun, face and arms equally tanned. I was also dressed head to toe in traditional white cotton Jarocho clothing. I probably was extra haggard from a severe second degree sunburn all across my back and shoulders.
If the handler was trained to avoid a false positive, why was he so sure that the dog needed to have a go at me? He was dragging the dog by the leash to have a go at my suitcase and carry on. The pooch was clearly disinterested and I am 100% certain I wasn't carrying anything that would have triggered a reaction.
I caught part of a Mythbusters where they were trying to trick a sniffer dog and they failed to (the only part I saw involved the target stashed in a diaper bag with dirty diapers).
Are they good enough to beat vacuum sealing? Is there a scent that they find repulsive enough they will avoid it?
What about ultrasonics? I head a story from an ex-Navy guy who flew on an E2-D Hawkeye (a kind of AWACS plane).
He said whenever they would land at an airbase, they would run drug dogs around the plane. But there was one side of the plane that had a turbine that ran when the plane was parked to keep the air conditioning and computers functioning. He said the dogs always avoided getting close to the turbine because the whine produced noise they didn't like.
This article says that
A U.S. district judge sided with the Justice Department to rule that it was reasonable for DEA agents to enter a property without permission or a warrant to install multiple “covert digital surveillance cameras.”
Again, this is a curtilage case, in that the Judge ruled that this is OK outside of your curtilage.
I've always wondered about the one time the drug dog decides to forget it's training and goes chasing after human food into a residence with cops in pursuit :)
Libertarians are actually right about many things. On the freedom side of things, that is. The economic side? Eh... not so much...
I don't want pot to be illegal, but it needs to be regulated like alcohol.
Of course it should; kids shouldn't be smoking pot or ingesting any psychoactive substance.
If you go to the store drunk as hell it is as rude as going there completely baked
Some people are like that when they're stone cold sober.
I just wish the stupid republicans would stop being turd sandwiches and just make it legal and wrap it into the Tobacco and Alcohol rules.
The Democrats are as much anti-reffer as the Republicans. If you want pot legalized (you can't regulate or control an illegal product), either vote Libertarian or Green; both those parties are for legalization, although I'd assume the Libbies would be less inclined to regulate it.
Free Martian Whores!
Personally I have no problem with them using a dog, as long as the dog is willing to testify in court with regard to the accuracy of their nose.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
To bring that a step further - say everybody and their dog (yeah, I went there) could, in fact, look through your walls and admire you and your fiance's silhouettes - do you still believe that 'curtains closed' would be a solid legal basis for indicting those who watch you through those walls and precluding authorities from doing so unless they had a warrant?
You are completely misinterpreting the concept of 'expectation of privacy'. Technical capability to perform an act does not imply that such an act is legal.
A very good example of this is US Mail. It is trivially simple to examine the contents of a First Class mail envelope. The container itself is nothing more than a single sheet of paper. Certainly it is much easier to defeat that barrier than it is to use your 'X-ray vision' through walls example. Yet consider the fact that even this most trivial of privacy measures is STRONGLY protected by the 4th Amendment. Of course, you don't have to take my word for it, why not get it straight from the Government:
"First-Class letters and parcels are protected against search and seizure under the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution, and, as such, cannot be opened without a search warrant."
-Direct quote from the USPS.gov website.
So no, even if it were trivially easy to surveil, such surveillance must be within the bounds of the Constitution.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
That's even scarier then. Why should the police be allowed to cruise around a neighbourhood and peer into people's homes without a warrant? Whatever happened to privacy?
The world != America.
America is peculiar, in that unlike the rest of the world, it has the bizarre hyper-individualistic quasi-religion of virtually unlimited freedom without responsibility.
Only a truly deluded Slashdot libertarian keyboard warrior would think that giving police powers to investigate suspicious activity would somehow violate their "rights" to break the law, be antisocial, and attack the common good, as if the "common good" didn't matter. That kind of thinking is selfish and morally bankrupt.
You guys make my mind boggle.
If "liberty" means handing carte blanche to drug dealers, then fuck liberty.
A bad thermostat is unlikely to melt all the snow and ice off your roof.
Trick-or-treaters aren't police, although usually one or two are dressed like them. I can legally put out a sign banning solicitors, so why can't I keep police off my lawn unless they have a warrant or it's an emergency?
The next person to say this gets kicked off the internet.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
More importantly, it would take only an untraceable amount of a drug, or even just a scent extract, to get the dog to signal.
No need to plant "evidence",just the smell of that "evidence" on your car or residence.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
On the flip-side, if a dog on public property is clearly signalling drugs in a bordering house, then yes, I'd certainly accept that as strong evidence in favour of granting a warrant.
How is that different than using an IR detector looking for grow lights, which has alreadty been declared unconstitutional?
Free Martian Whores!
I don't care if they cops do a search of my home without a warrant as long as they don't destroy anything or pay for the damages. In the end I want to be free of drug dealers and crooks in my community. If the price to pay is a couple of false positives then so be it. If there's abuse we can deal with it when it occurs.
The way I see it, if you don't do anything wrong you have nothing to fear. Otherwise, let the system catch you.
Might be in the US, but it's perfectly legal here - they also use unusually high electricity bills to do the same, and in the winter they simply look for houses without snow on the roof.
Of course, you're going to get false positives from this, such as somebody growing chillies in the attic, which is why the police can't just go breaking down doors, they have to find secondary evidence (eg repeated visits to the property by known drug dealers/users), and then apply for a search warrant.
At the end of the day it's for the courts to decide whether a warrant is justified. Personally I think if your drug dealing/growing activities are visible from the street outside, for whatever reason, then you should have been trying harder and deserve everything you get, and that's coming from someone who uses a little grass.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
There are approximately 4,450 federal crimes, and that doesn't include state, county, and city crimes. You are almost surely a criminal, and you don't even know it. In my town many people have gotten snagged for throwing away a water heater, or the box it came in. That is not illegal, however it is illegal to replace a water heater without having a city inspection. The fine is thousands of dollars, and then you have to bring up everything to code in your house for your water heater. Now people throw water heaters and boxes in their neighbors dumpsters. How would you feel if the police saw that in your alley from someone else, and decided to bust your door down, and found an illegally replaced heater from the previous owner of your house putting you on the hook for thousands of dollars?
People just don't think this shit through.
Last time I heard if you shoot a police dog you get a very similar treatment as if you had shot a police officer. I'm a big proponent of the second amendment, but you gotta use your head and act rationally!
I believe the case in question, though, involved Law Enforcement taking dogs onto private property to sniff around the house.
Legally, that is vastly different from trying to get a whiff from the sidewalk.
"856.011Disorderly intoxication."
You are mistaken.
That is not a law against public intoxication. It is a law against being disorderly while publicly intoxicated.
That is a VERY different thing.
When they find your stash does that really matter?
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
If only we could shoot the dogs with the drones ...
He will if he values his job.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
The court case says something about trespassing, since it is about the police going onto private property to sniff around with dogs, without a warrant.
This is not a case about police with dogs walking down the middle of the street and accidentally smelling a pot farm.
You don't live where I live. Many of them ARE the shit and scum.
If you aren't doing anything illegal, you have EVERYTHING to worry about!
Cops don't 'interview' legal people. Just ask them!
When you are in the presence of an officer, you are the only person in that situation that has any liability. The BEST case scenario is that nothing happens. Everything else will cost you. Inconvenience at a minimum. Torture at the worst. And death somewhere in between.
To be in the presence of someone who has no liability, who immediately demands that you be responsible for their emotional state by lethal force, is one of the most dangerous situations you could be in. Especially if you are legal.
DO NOT TALK TO COPS!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc
B-(
A friend will come and bail you out of jail, a true friend will be sitting next to you saying, "damn that was fun!"
The thing is, dogs are eager to please. You dont even have to try to train them to alert whenever their handler is suspicious - they do that naturally. So the way this works is, the cop's 'gut' isnt sufficient to get a warrant, he needs some evidence not just a hunch. So he just gets the dog, who naturally picks up on the handlers state of mind and will alert as a result, neatly giving that initial hunch credibility and transforming it into 'evidence' which can justify a search.
It's a neat solution to those for whom the Constitution and the fundamentals of our legal system are 'problems' I suppose. Now the only question is whether the Supremes will give this workaround their stamp of approval immediately or send it back down the ranks for some tweaking.
I heard a story from a friend the other day about her coming back from the Caribbean and having a dog alert to her bag. Turned out she had a banana in there that she forgot about. I thought, "Ok, so a drug dog alerts to a banana, and they can search her bag? How is that probable cause? How do we know these dogs only alert to drugs?" Yeah, I still wonder.
"What the American public doesn't know is what makes them the American public." -Ray Zalinsky (Tommy Boy)
This is bullshit I am sick of this cops put their life on the line crap, the data does not support it. In 2010 according to the bureau of labor statistics workplace fatalities report there were 545 work related deaths of workers classified as Management occupations, 261 work related deaths of Protective service occupations (inc fire, police, security guards, etc.) One could argue that the rate per 100k is high for Protective service occupations (7.4%) vs management (3.4%) but that ignores the 7% for repair and maintenance occupations, 11% death rate for construction occupations, 14.2% for transportation occupations, and 25.3% for Farming, fishing, and forestry occupations. We can dig deeper and see that all government occupations have workplace fatalities at a rate of 2.2%.
Police and fire jobs are not dangerous, they just pound their chest and proclaim that they are heroes and deserve to be worshiped. If risk of death is what makes you a hero in our society, lets worship the farmers, fishers, and foresters. Without them we really would be dead.
Source: http://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfoi/cfoi_revised10.pdf (all rates are per 100k)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyllo_v._United_States
Note that the majority opinion was written by Justice Scalia. Feel free to read it, I'm sure it's rather convincing. The gist is that IR equipment is not generally available to public citizens and therefore you have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the IR emitted from your home. This is much different than, say, wifi, because laptops with integrated wifi are generally available to the public.
:(){
By "the people @ the top" I assume you mean we the voters, since we are the ones who keep re-electing the prohibition parties by 99-to-1 landslides. Yes, you're right: we're fools.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
America is peculiar, in that unlike the rest of the world, it has the bizarre hyper-individualistic quasi-religion of virtually unlimited freedom without responsibility.
Not at all. When you infringe on the rights of others, you should be held accountable. Nothing about the production, possession, or consumption of Cannabis infringes on anyones rights.
Only a truly deluded Slashdot libertarian keyboard warrior would think that giving police powers to investigate suspicious activity would somehow violate their "rights" to break the law, be antisocial, and attack the common good, as if the "common good" didn't matter.
Only a truly deluded fascist would think that Cannabis prohibition has anything to do with the common good, as Cannabis has been repeatedly shown to be less harmful on every measure than substances we tolerate happily. It's less addictive than caffeine. Less toxic than aspirin. It's more weakly correlated with mental illness than cat ownership.
No, Cannabis prohibition has nothing to do with the common good, and everything to do with giving the authorities a blanket excuse to persecute undesirables. This is why the US has more black men in chains today than it ever had under slavery. This is why drug dogs magically get less accurate when the suspect is hispanic. And this is congruent with the historical record. Cannabis prohibition was sold to the public based on racism. It was racist in the thirties, and it's racist today.
What's morally bankrupt is promoting a policy for the "common good" when it's so demontrably harmful, and refusing to seriously consider alternatives to that policy.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I don't want pot to be illegal, but it needs to be regulated like alcohol. If you go to the store drunk as hell it is as rude as going there completely baked, and you have a major problem if you do that.
This is what I was referring to in GP's post.
I think that 856.011(1) is subjective enough that it could be applied to anyone who was thought to be intoxicated anyway (e.g. That guy is wasted and could stumble and knock these goods off the shelf). It doesn't say you have to cause damage, just that you have to endanger.
I have a problem with using dogs for criminal enforcement. In court you can only cross examine the handler, not the dog. I have long suspected the handlers can use hand signals to tell the dog to alert. Either way they walk into court and testify that the dog alerted to the presence of drugs.
I've seen a cop get fired. No one would have heard about it, but I knew him personally, so I found out. He was caught 'accidentally' taking evidence home. Therefore you are wrong.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
There are bad cops, there are asshole cops, and there are cops who look the other way when they see the bad asshole cops. They refuse to testify against their fellow cops. They refuse to turn them in for breaking the law. Hell, even after their fellow cops get caught violating the law, they still turn out en-masse to protest the fact that they are not above the law!
In my mind, this is how it should go. You're found out to be a bad cop? You lose your pension, instantly, period. You're found to have known about a bad cop and do nothing? You lose your pension, instantly, period. You turn a bad cop in? His pension is added to yours.
Hit people where the wallet is and watch how fast the cops start policing themselves.
:(){
That IR detector case is more than a decade old. And with the Obama appointment of the conservative Kagan, who voted to gut Miranda, don't expect the Supreme Court to stand in the way of the police state any more.
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
This needs modded up, everyone should read the article as to why dogs should not be allowed in these cases.
I don't think it should be illegal either..but you can't just blame the republicans on that.
I mean, Obama had majority in both houses...and never ever TRIED to pass any type of law changing the controlled substance laws in this country...not even an attempt.
I still wonder, why it took a constitutioinal amemdment to ban and allow again alcohol....
Yet...pot was made illegal at the swipe of a pen...?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
"Behavior that could be taught as a trained response to any number of stimuli, including a voice command. The point being that officer friendly could trigger that same response with or without drugs being present."
The point being that if this were true then anyone could trivially challenge the legality of the officer's raids in court by asking for this test to be carried out.
In reality, police don't teach their dog this sort of thing precisely because it would completely undermine and destroy any subsequent legal action stemming from a search with the dog if the defendant could trivially ask the courts to demand prove that the dog's actions were legit.
So yes it is possible to teach dogs these things, but the laws and training regimes of dog units are as strict as they are and avoid this precisely to ensure that convictions based on evidence found with dogs are going to be solid.
WTF, how could you prove any voice command wrong doing by the officer? We're not arguing that the dogs can't find drugs, we're arguing that the dogs 'can' find drugs that aren't even there. You see in the cases where no drugs are found, no charges will be brought up. In cases where drugs are found because the trainer told the dog to point even though the dog wouldn't, you couldn't tell the difference. Police do all kinds of shit that undermines subsequent legal action, and sometimes it gets thrown out of court, but a lot of the poorest and most ignorant do not get the legal help that could get them out of trouble and instead plea bargain.
Please mind your infinitive. "This needs to be modded up"
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I don't want pot to be illegal, but it needs to be regulated like alcohol. If you go to the store drunk as hell it is as rude as going there completely baked, and you have a major problem if you do that.
I don't know how it works in your state, but in most places public intoxication laws apply, no matter if a person is drunk on alcohol or high on any other drug. If they are high enough in public to get stares, they can probably get nailed for public intoxication.
In reality, police don't teach their dog this sort of thing precisely because it would completely undermine and destroy any subsequent legal action stemming from a search with the dog if the defendant could trivially ask the courts to demand prove that the dog's actions were legit.
It is not necessary that the dog be taught this type of thing, but only that they learn this type of thing. The dog can be great at finding stuff, but if also has significant times when it finds things that are not there (the false-positive rate), for whatever reason, then that is a problem, open to abuse, even if unintended.
Lack of consistent regular training clearly makes dog units less reliable than they potentially could be according to this source:
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-01-06/news/ct-met-canine-officers-20110105_1_drug-sniffing-dogs-alex-rothacker-drug-dog
"I think that 856.011(1) is subjective enough that it could be applied to anyone who was thought to be intoxicated anyway"
If somebody tried to prosecute me on that basis, using that law, I could get a CHEAP lawyer and fry their asses in court.
Even if something is a law, it is still subordinate to the Constitution.
The Congress can (and do) pass many laws which are later struck down as unConstitutional. In fact, there is nothing to prevent them from doing so, nor is there any actual penalty other than potential bad press. In fact, the 'bad press' could be 'good press' depending on their constituency. Consider the flag burning laws. These were struck down as unConstitutional but are sometimes used by the sponsor of the bill as a campaign point. It all depends on the perspective of the people who elect a particular representative/senator.
What you are getting confused by (and rightfully so) is what constitutes 'plain sight'. Certainly a combination x-ray/sonic/recombiner of reflected/refracted light which operated from a van outside a home but can produce an image as if the officer were inside the home would be viewed as not 'plain sight', it augments the senses of the officers as would be typically expected. However, does that augmentation pertain to chemical indicators which may be floating out of the home?
It's a grey area, and that's why the court is evaluating it.
It is going to be an ever repeating case as technology makes previously impossible techniques ubiquitous. It's a byproduct of the fact that many of our laws and protections were written based on current capability and intentionally or unintentionally ignored the potential for abuse as the world changes.
It's why we have the weird bi-polarism in the US government at the moment where it respects that a letter in a paper envelope is inviolate without a warrant but an electronic message sitting in your inbox is 'non-private'.
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The handler, looking displeased and suspicious at a kid who isn't some double-blind in a line-up, could signal the dog anyway. He could do so intentionally.
Yes, and the cop could just shoot the kid, or push his car off a cliff, or plant drugs on him, blah blah. We get it. You think cops are evil, corrupt guys who just want other people to suffer. Hope you never have to call one because your life is at risk or someone you know is in real trouble. Actually, I do hope so, because you might change your tune, even just a bit.
This whole cartoon-villain cop thing is ridiculous. If you're going to deny the signaling from all of these very talented dogs and hard working handlers because you think there's a bad handler out there, then you need to be just as ready to assume that everyone these guys encounter are exactly the scumbags you're so sure they're not. You can't have it both ways.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
When seconds count, the police are only minutes away.
Personally I have no problem with them using a dog, as long as the dog is willing to testify in court with regard to the accuracy of their nose.
If the dog could do that, then it'd also be capable of suing the police for getting it hooked on the substances to start with. That is, after all, how substance detection dogs work - they get them addicted to the substances.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
"You mean the "Clever Hans" effect where the handler provides the cues instead of the smell? It's a know issue, both handlers and dogs are trained to try and avoid it."
No, they are usually not, and even when they are, they are still notoriously, and ridiculously, unreliable.
Study after study and analysis after analysis prove you wrong.
Drug-sniffing dogs are TERRIBLE at their jobs. In the Chicago review of actual police statistics, the average reliability of drug-sniffing dogs was only 44% true positives (vastly too small a number to qualify as probable cause), and in the case of one minority (can you say "Handler bias?" Sure, I knew you could) it was only 27%. That's not theory, those are actual historical figures.
Unless some vastly better method of training comes up, drug-sniffing dogs need to be taken out of the picture. They are responsible for a huge amount of injustice in this country.
"You might find this story interesting."
Interesting and informative personal anecdote, but the meat of it is still just reporting about the UC-Davis study.
Heaven forbid they should ever be proactive. I agree if they receive a tip someone is going to kill you, they should only show up after you're dead. In this case they would be helping Darwin out.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
When I first started reading your post, that video was the first thing that came to mind. I recommend it to all of my friends.
When I was a small but very curious child, my mother used to say to me: "If you poke your nose where it doesn't belong, you will learn things that you did not want to know."
That might not be an exact match for this situation, but close enough.
What moron modded this troll?
http://reason.com/archives/2011/02/21/the-mind-of-a-police-dog/1
"It is not "trespassing" to just come onto someones property and come to the door, just like a trick-or-treater would."
Yes, it is. Police are specifically prohibited from certain activities that the general public can perform with impunity (or "immunity", if you want to think of it that way).
A police officer may not come onto my property unless they (A) are investigating a crime report or domestic disturbance, (B) are invited by the owner or resident, or (C) have a search warrant. In other words, they have to have legal justification.
Where I live, police had to abandon their practice of going door-to-door to sell raffle tickets or tickets to the Policeman's Ball (yes, it is a real thing), because as it turned out they were prohibited by state law. Their fundraising is not "legitimate legal reason" to be on my property.
So... NO. They cannot just walk up to my front door with no reason. They are legally and specifically prohibited from doing so.
If you aren't doing anything illegal, you have nothing to worry about
What if you are doing something illegal?
Very few citizens accept all laws they are required to follow. Privacy allows society to function, by limiting the ability law enforcement has to detect victimless crime. Virtually every time in history that this limit has been removed, the society has crumbled.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
Drug dogs are a formality, if they bring a drug dog to a location the dog handler only has to /say/ that the dog got a "hit" - so it's all on the honor system anyway. It doesn't matter if the drug dealer sealed everything in cellophane and washed it down with bleach and sprayed cayenne pepper all over the yard: the cops are going to search. Even well-meaning handlers are subject to bias as the whole thing is based off of interpreting a dog's behavior.
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It also has a chilling effect on the 2nd amendment self-defense, because if an armed gang busts down your door, you now have to first meekly enquire as to whether they might be cops or not.
Yes, I know the electoral college plays a role in presidential elections. They usually vote the same way as the people, but not always. Even when they don't though, in your lifetime the only times they disagreed with the people, the elections were close. It sucks that Bush was elected, but not just because he was a bad president. The worst thing about him being elected is that about half of America voted against him. What you're leaving out, though, is that if your hated electoral college had chosen Gore, the same problem would have remained: we'd have a president that half the voters voted against. Close elections are a lose/lose matter regardless of the electoral college. I'm ok with abolishing it, but don't kid yourself that doing so is going to make people happy. You will still have presidents that you hate. Everyone will, at least half the time and usually more. That's how it'll be until we switch to approval voting or something like that.
So you've got a point about the bill signer/vetoer but even so, it's a minor thing. Even in the popular vote, the prohibition party's presidents get 99-to-1 landslides.
But wait a minute.. you're saying we don't elect ANYONE? The electoral collegs does it all? They even elect your House and Senate members, the ones who actually made the drug laws and whose responsibility it is to repeal them? And they elect your governor and state legislature members too?
Dude, you should move to America. Our system over here has some problems too, but nevertheless we have way more democracy than whatever country you're talking about.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Uh, aren't heat sources like grow lights useful for things other than pot cultivation? Whereas pot smoke is pretty exclusively associated with pot smoking. So that would be your major difference right there, I think.
Yes, and the cop could just shoot the kid, or push his car off a cliff, or plant drugs on him, blah blah. We get it. You think cops are evil, corrupt guys who just want other people to suffer.
Is there a reason we have to assume either all cops are well and good and 100% pure all the time or they're all evil dicks out to get you 100% of the time? Why do we have testing standards at all, and why do we have testing standards that aim to detect if the handler is signaling the dog if the handler is never going to have an agenda?
Also where I live cops have been frequently caught planting drugs in cars during searches. Hell, I've had my car illegally searched--an officer pulled me over without reason, without issuing a reason, sneered at me, and issued one instruction: "Get out of the car." He didn't give his badge number or his name, he proceeded to search my car meticulously. I watched him closely, which ... annoyed him. He then declared (annoyed) that the car was clean and ordered me to "get out of here." His partner looked VERY uncomfortable, didn't seem much of a conversationalist but looked empathetic... I don't think he liked working with the guy. So, literal good cop/bad cop, not an act. I've run into the good cops out by themselves, too.
In the end I was left with nothing to report. No badge number, no name, it was dark and I didn't get a squad car number.
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It's not that simple. It'd probably be more accurate to say, "in plain smell". If a human can smell cannabis without seeing it and can establish where it's coming from then that might count.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I'm not in favor of abolishing the Electoral College. I'm in favor of complete reconfiguration of it, to representative of total popular vote within a state.This would probably really mess with the two party system more than anything else, This would give each candidate electors from each state, represented by the total percentage of votes received. This would give Libertarian, Green, Peace/Freedom, Constitution, Tea, Communist, Socialist each part of the pie, and provide a better representation of the total view of the nation as a whole.
I would also break apart the President and VP offices at that point awarding the VP to top runner-up, giving the opposition a voice in Administration, and allowing for a better check on Abuse by the ruling party.
I've always thought that the President's current job should be divided into two elected jobs, President (Domestic) and Prime Minister (Foreign) (Replacing Secretary of State), and laws regarding treaties and such would require the Prime Minister's signature, not the President's. Things like Wars and "Police Actions" would require approval of both.
But in the end, too many people would complain that it was too complicated and would vote for Dictator instead, because that was easier to understand.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Why would anyone have confidence in that assertion?
"Cursed is he who rises early in the morning..." Isiah 5:11
And every honest cop I know is no longer a cop. They could not stand working with the other scumbags anymore. One is a female cop who was heavily harassed daily by her co workers, she never filed any complaints because she remembers what the department did to the last woman cop that complained.
Your local police department is a group of gang members. They will do what they want, when they want, and they will hit you in the face with the butt of a rifle and get a raise for doing it.
Never forget that. NEVER trust a cop, never ever think they are there to help you.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You'd still have to be up against that curtain and further curtain wold have to be up against said glass sliding door for some time to heat it up enough to to be able to even make out a blurry silhouette. But yes, that would certainly do the trick. That's a far cry from looking through walls and seeing your outlines doing whatever it is your outlines are doing, though :)
But then shouldn't that also apply to that same sliding door when the curtains behind (or in front) are not closed?
The effort is certainly a very low one; I need but glance in its direction. But I still have to make that effort. There's no good reason for me to be looking through your window when I'm just walking down the street.
Is there a reason we have to assume either all cops are well and good and 100% pure all the time or they're all evil dicks out to get you 100% of the time?
Apparently so, because the people in this thread are making it sound like no handler and his dog should be trusted, ever, to legitimately pick up on contraband.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Probably, I only vaguely remembered and it may have been somebody else.. though your username is memorable enough :)
Have you seen some of the positions people propose? Some of those may well qualify as being an encrypted form. We sure can't figure them out. We haven't tried a brute force approach yet, though...
Said like a true hypocrite who would run to the pigs the first sign someone might kick his ass.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Flexyourrights.org has some excellent videos (I think you can find them all on youtube) about how to exercise your protection against illegal searches in the US. I made my kids watch them. Unfortunately, this thing with the dogs is a really nasty loophole. I know someone whose teenage son was pulled over by the cops for some minor traffic violation. (When they pulled him over, he didn't know what he'd done wrong.) They tell him they want to search his car, and he says no. (Most likely he didn't do it the way the flexyourrights videos suggest, which is very politely and respectfully: "I'm sorry, officer, I know you're just trying to do your job, but I don't consent to a search.") So these small-town cops get all bent out of shape, bring in the drug-sniffing dog, and encourage the dog like crazy to get all worked up. "Come on, boy, do you smell anything? Do you? Come on...good dog!" They then use that as probable cause to basically rip the car apart searching for drugs. They found a soda straw from McDonald's, which they claimed was drug paraphernalia. Now the kid has a court date.
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I'm not sure I am misinterpreting it, but then there's the layman interpretation and then there's the legal interpretation.
I'm certainly not a lawyer, but to me it seems that in terms of the whole 'looking through walls' part, the 'search' portion of 'search and seizure' applies.
So the question is whether or not such an activity would be considered a 'search'. Clearly, the courts have already ruled that even just using a FLIR to spot radiant heat from a house constitutes a search.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyllo_v._United_States
That decision was a 5-4 decision with mixed views from 'sides' of the political spectrum. Good arguments are made there against this ruling (especially poignant being the 'snow melting' example).
The portions that are applicable to what I stated are:
So if FLIR does get incorporated in everybody's
cellphone*, the ruling itself loses one basis.
As it stands, you do indeed have a reasonable expectation of privacy. But this can change if society believes this is no longer reasonable.
Thus I can well-imagine this ruling being challenged in the future. Although despite some obvious caveats, I do believe that the majority of those in power to challenge it will agree with the view that anything and everything within or attached to the house bestows a defacto reasonable expectation of privacy and may even extend this to overrule any 'in plain view' aspects in particular circumstances.
That's not actually true. The last time I checked into this, it was that they trained the dogs to associate the smell of various chemicals with play, so when they smell pot, they want to jump and bite and overall expect you to have toys on you.
- No Bounce, No Play -
I actually love dog -- I mean dogs -- but I was kidding. I know on /. it is sometimes hard to tell. Although on Halloween I was tempted to extend the joke and point out that police officer is very tasty as well, especially if turned into delicious Eastern NC style barbecue...
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Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
Shoot. I had an asterisk there that I was going to expand on.
Many many years ago SONY had started outfitting cameras with NightShot mode. This was basically just removing the IR filter at the press of a button. While this was great for those playing with near-IR photography, it also had the side-effect of very badly 'looking through clothing'. This had some backlash, SONY modified it a bit, and this mode in general never found wide adoption across manufacturers, and is even absent from many current SONY models - requiring those interested in IR photography to manually remove the filter.
It's entirely possible, then, that FLIR would not make it onto cameras/cellphones because there would actually be a public backlash against it.
http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=126782&page=1#.UJGoRmffCKE
The gist is that IR equipment is not generally available to public citizens...
How much longer can we expect this ruling to stand, though?
http://www.amazon.com/Fluke-Ti10-9Hz-Thermal-Imager/dp/B0018LCAM6
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If you attack the police dog, you get charged the same as if you attack a police man. So, if the dog is a police officer, then the dog sniffing around your property should require a warrant, just as if a police man were conducting a search.
Why, without your clothes, you're naked, Miss Dudley!
I expect it to hold until cell phones have IR cameras.
The reason being that just because it's *possible* to buy IR equipment doesn't mean that the general public has it. If only, say, one in a thousand people have this equipment, you still have a reasonable expectation of privacy, IMO. That said, the cost is still about 10% of the median household income for an el-cheap-o version, which is pretty significant.
However, once it crosses into territory such as wifi, where you're now greater than one in ten and the equipment costs less than 2% of the median household income, you can say that a private citizen is likely to have such equipment in their possession.
:(){
Well it's the whole idea of the validity of their actions, that they are adhering to the law and are independent witnesses and for example are not filling quotas or fulfilling personal revenge or in any way tainted the validity of the case. They declared drugs, no whose drugs where they, who placed them there and where did the police actually originally discover them. They say they found them there but if they broke one part of due process and the law how many other parts were they willing to break for what ever reason they wanted to. The whole idea of due process and trial before your peers and everything associated with the proper application of justice is to protect citizens from their government not to facilitate the governments persecution of it's citizens.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
I've been coming to Slashdot for over 10 years, and this posting was what made me create an account so I could comment. I'm a criminal justice major in my final semester at SVSU in Michigan. I had the pleasure of taking a course called Criminal Procedure taught by Michigan Appellate Court Judge Stephen Borrello a little over a year ago. We discussed Florida v. Jardines at great length in his class, since he had sat on the bench for a near identical case in Michigan called People v. Jeffrey Jones (2008). The appellate court ruled 2-1 in favor of the state in 'Jones' and Judge Borrello was the lone dissenting opinion. Judge Borrello gave us his decision and tasked us with determining his thought process for dissenting in an essay. I argued in agreement with his logic that a sniff test outside of a door is a "search" and therefore necessitates a warrant. Judge Borrello (and I) believed that since the dog was 'breaking the plane' of the door threshold that it was in essence a search. He believed, unlike his fellow judges, that Kyllo was applicable because police were still using an extra-sensory method to "access" the house (the dog). The other two judges argued that since a dog can only confirm or deny the existence of a narcotic they are not doing a "search," and since there is no implicit right to privacy pertaining to contraband the police were justified in their actions. He told us in that class that he believed Florida v. Jardines could very well go to the Supreme Court and its pretty cool to see that he was right. I'll be following this decision closely as I find it has far reaching ramifications. I'm well aware the following is a slippery slope argument, but I'm going to make it anyway as it's the same one I made in his class: If police have the power to walk a dog up to your door, what's to stop them from walking a dog up to every door on every block? The home is one's sanctuary free from government intrusion, that's how the 4th amendment was intended, and I think that's how it should be.
They shouldn't unless there's probable cause for a search, as this is a search.
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The defense attorney is incompetent if this case doesn't contain a drug dog search of every justice's property.
They shouldn't unless there's probable cause for a search, as this is a search.
The issue being discussed is the probable cause that's established when a dog happens to notice something while not in the middle of a search (say, while walking down the sidewalk, not inside a house). A dog's signaling from the sidewalk isn't any different than a police officer smelling a cloud of weed from the sidewalk.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Kind of. The dog is a detection instrument--it happens to be organic. This is thus similar to if a police officer walked down the road holding a metal box that he could point at houses to generate an X-ray image--the metal box can see inside the house. If we blind the officer and just have a red/green display with visual analysis inside the metal box that tries to notate if it sees guns, bombs, marijuana grow options, underage drinking... then you have the same thing.
Similarly, if the officer stops in the street, listening around for giggles, talk about 'lighting up', whatnot. Perhaps with a small dish that concentrates sound so he can point it at various houses to hear inside them better through the walls.
On the other hand, if you're smoking up a storm and an officer walking by can't NOT smell that shit ... the arguments become weaker. It starts coming to, "The smell was overwhelming? How'd you know it was precisely MY house?" But unless you had issues, you couldn't be in the area and NOT smell it, so you know something's going on. In this case, no need to haul out equipment--like dogs--to find out if something is happening in the area.
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Become proscribed as a 'masking drug' ? :)
In the US, that gets a bit tricky. Particularly in traffic incidents, you are under some obligation to 'speak'. (Technically, all required info could be passed by writing, texting, etc., but I suspect you'll have an easier time if you just talk.)
This is why the US has more black men in chains today than it ever had under slavery.
Well, that and population growth... You will notice that the percentage is down quite a bit, I trust?
Not tricky at all.
The only things you need to say to a cop are:
Am I free to go?
Am I being detained?
Am I under arrest?
I want a lawyer.
I don't consent to searches.
I don't give interviews.
And really only Am I free to go, and I want a lawyer.
Cop: Do you know why I pulled you over?
You: Am I free to go?
Cop: Yes. LEAVE!
or
Cop: No.
You: I want a lawyer.
Simple.
Cop: Do you have any weapons or nuclear devices?
You: Am I under arrest?
Cop: Yes.
You: I want a lawyer
or
Cop: No.
You: Am I free to go?
Cop No.
You: I want a lawyer.
or
Cop Yes.
You: LEAVE!
Cops like to create small talk to establish particularized suspicion. They used to try and use the fact you refuse a search or interview as probable cause. That has been struck down over and over in the S.C. So now their training is to ask 3 seemingly innocent questions to get you rolling answers, and then hit you with a zinger to create suspicion.
For example:
Cop: Nice day out, huh?
You: Yes Sir.
Cop: Nice car. Is it yours?
You: Yes Sir.
Cop: Get good mileage?
You: Yes Sir.
Cop: Got any drugs or nuclear weapons in your car?
You: Um. (weird look) No. No Sir!
Cop: You don't mind my searching then, do you?
You: I don't consent to searches.
Some cops will push this situation as particularized suspicion. Because you were answering all Yeses, and without hesitation, and then all of a sudden ~changed~ your behavior, answers. And depending on the D.A. and Court, might just get away with it.
You're much better off establishing from the beginning that you are only going to provide papers if required, and only going to answer 'interviews' with a lawyer.
And by all means, RECORD the interaction. With your mind at a minimum.
B-|
A friend will come and bail you out of jail, a true friend will be sitting next to you saying, "damn that was fun!"
I actually love dog -- I mean dogs -- but I was kidding. I know on /. it is sometimes hard to tell. Although on Halloween I was tempted to extend the joke and point out that police officer is very tasty as well, especially if turned into delicious Eastern NC style barbecue...
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Mmmm. Long pork FTW. Got any good recipes?
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