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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."
The organized crime will do far more damage then any pot smoker anyway.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
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.
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.
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.
It's a difficult problem in the US. Although marijuana is illegal here it is by far the number one cash crop in the US - ahead of wheat, barley, corn, soybeans and everything else. It is also one of our largest imports and a significant portion of our balance of international trade. Somehow we have not learned the lessons of prohibition.
I don't care for the product myself but man, this is crazy.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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!
In my experience the police don't bother to go out and preemptively fight even the easy crimes. They just sit at the station and wait for someone to come in a report a crime, then they spend 20 minutes trying to trick that person into admitting guilt (even if that person hasn't committed any crimes)
On 2 occasions I have gone with people to the police station to report thefts (a stolen car in one case) and after the police listened to the whole story, their first question was "so, you stole a car?" (in the other case it was a stolen helmet, and the first question was "so, you stole a helmet?")
Why bother putting in the effort to investigate existing crimes when you can just invent a reason to arrest the person standing in front of you. As far as the police are concerned, guilt or innocence doesn't matter as long as SOMEONE goes to jail. After that it becomes the court's problem, the police still meet their monthly arrest quota (and they do have a quota, however much they deny it: http://blog.motorists.org/if-you-didnt-believe-ticket-quotas-existed-before-you-will-now/)
It's pretty simple, really. Throwing out evidence that was illegally acquired is the only tool available to ensure that evidence is not illegally acquired. After a team of police officers, investigators and lawyers have been working on a case, putting their efforts into it, they do not want to have the case fall apart, so there is, theoretically, some peer pressure on them not to screw up the evidence.
Without this incentive not to break the law, we would have police going house to house, knocking on doors, busting down the doors that don't open to them, and performing full-house searches, just looking for something, anything, to create criminal cases on. We had this in our pre-revolutionary state, and our Constitution was written to prevent it, amongst other abuses.
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But not very well, it would appear: http://www.ucdmc.ucdavis.edu/welcome/features/2010-2011/02/20110223_drug_dogs.html
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
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.
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?
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.
What does the TSA have to do with any of this?
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
You might find this story interesting.
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!
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"
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