Federal appeals court: Drug dog that’s barely more accurate than a coin flip is good enough

westward_jabroni · 22時間前

"The problem here is that invasive searches based on no more than a government official’s hunch is precisely what the Fourth Amendment is supposed to guard against."

This hits the nail on the head. The 4th amendment is designed to ensure that government has proper and just cause for a search of an individual's private residence or property. Again and again it is proven and demonstrated how easy it is to manipulate dogs to "alert". The longer the court system lets this problem go unregulated, the longer and more often it will be abused and used to violate individuals rights. Unfortunately for us, each individual citizen, an end does not seem near.

nepentheblue · 22時間前

From the article:

It turns out that Lex’s handler gives the dog a reward every time he alerts, regardless of whether that alert is accurate. Lex isn’t getting rewarded for filtering innocent motorists from guilty ones. He’s being trained to authorize a search, each and every time he’s called to duty.

And:

Following the Supreme Court’s prescription in Harris, the opinion notes that that the dog had passed tests in “controlled settings” and cited testimony about the dog’s reliability. But that testimony came from the dog’s handler. And there’s no further explanation of what those tests in controlled settings meant.

Also:

Moreover, the court notes that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit gave its okay to a dog with a success rate of 43 percent, or less accurate than a coin flip. This even lower number jibes with a 2011 Chicago Tribune investigation of suburban Chicago police dogs that found a success rate of just 44 percent. That review also found that with Latino drivers, the accuracy rate plunged to just 27 percent, more evidence that the dogs are merely reflecting the biases and presuppositions of their handlers. Other studies have shown false positive rates of up to 80 percent. With success rates that low, it’s hard not to conclude that drug dogs aren’t tools to determine probably cause, but basically a “search warrant on a leash.”

And:

The problem is that this ruling gives wide latitude to police agencies in the Seventh Circuit to use drug dogs as a end-run around the Fourth Amendment. And that affects everyone, not just drug dealers. That means more latitude for forfeiture, and more potential for the sort of corruption and legalized highway robbery we’ve seen reported countless times over the past few years.

All of this is very troubling. The dogs aren't accurate enough/are responding to the handler rather than the presence of illegal substances. False positives by the dogs lead to unnecessary searches. The article mentions this as being an "end run around the Fourth Amendment." Sounds very much as if it is.

01headshrinker · 21時間前

Fed Appeals court: Bad policing is good enough

DeafDumbBlindBoy · 21時間前

I have two dogs. Any time I want them to go into a fit of apoplexy, I say the word "squirrel."

Does that mean there are actually any squirrels around?

ghotier · 22時間前

This is what happens when you leave scientific questions up to the court. The idea that a dog that is right less than 50% of the time could be considered "probable" cause is ludicrous.

NeonDisease · 21時間前

And with the magic words "the dog alerted", I will make the 4th Amendment disappear!

And you can NEVER even challenge this in court, because you can't prove/disprove a smell!

squidbillie · 21時間前

Luckily if you don't have anything to hide you have nothing to worry about.

You know, except for the fact these dogs have been used to okay searches that include strip and cavity searches.

But other than getting anal raped by cops and doctors on your way to the movies without having done anything at all: nothing to worry about.

slapdashbr · 20時間前

IMHO

As a scientist, I see what happens in the criminal justice system, and I am dismayed.

Outside of very narrow types of evidence (basically, DNA testing and certain types of drug testing) there is no effort to make the evaluation of evidence a scientific process. Drug dogs being no more reliable than a coin flip, to me, proves that they are utterly bullshit. Where is the data to show that there is some sort of confidence interval that a dog is actually alerting on a targeted substance? Has that testing ever even been done in any situation?

Hypothetically, I could see an argument that a properly trained dog could actually find drugs accurately. But I don't see evidence that this has been tested correctly, with a double-blind controlled study, etc.

SlothSorcerer · 22時間前

I got stopped by one at the last festival I went to and had to show my dick to a cop for no reason. Great start to the day.

thebreakfastking · 21時間前

Never tell me the odds

diefree85 · 21時間前

This is amazing to me. We have been shown objectively the dogs are alerting based on their handler and the courts still can't process that. K-9's have great uses but this isn't one of them.

Biff666Mitchell · 21時間前

Isnt this a violation of the constitutional amendment that guarantees you no unlawful search and seizure? If they cant prove that you need to be searched, then why are they searching you? This is just another situation of police abusing power to try and collect revenue for drug users. Just make the shit legal and tax it the right way. We'll probably even save money from the silly ass police officer having to pretend that he's justified.

7LeagueBoots · 20時間前

Last time I got pulled over they mildly harassed me for a bit and wanted to search my car. I told them they did not have permission to do so, so they held me there until they could bring a drug dog. I didn't have drugs in the car, but but the dog got excited by the rear bumper. Some drunk twit visiting the house next to where I had been staying had peed on my bumper and the dog was super interested.

That was cop justification for them to search my car, permission or no. They didn't find anything (one of the cops kept trying to get me to stand facing away from my car so I could not see what the other one was doing, but I ignored his attempts to get me to turn my back on the other cop), and eventually let me go.

Stupid dog was only interested in someone's pee.

amril39 · 18時間前

I've had the, "If you won't let me search your car then I'm calling in the k9 unit, and I NEVER fail to get a hit," treatment. Nothing in my car at all, and all I got was a nice set of scratches from the damn dogs and everything being torn out of it.

Possibly_a_Firetruck · 20時間前

Its absurd that we rely on the whims of an animal for such a key part of the legal process.

Schlegdawg · 20時間前

So they're four-legged lottery tickets that payout in the form of asset forfeiture.

fcukthemoderators3 · 19時間前

It's about the money not the drugs. Even 43% is still money in the piggies bank. The drug war is a for profit industry for cops, lawyer, and our pathetic excuse of a judiciary system.

kernelreb · 21時間前

I have a hard time accepting that a 43% accuracy rate is acceptable within the eyes of the law. But it is in line with other efficiency rates for law and security forces:

Eye Witness Testimony <= 60%

Gov online Surveillance <= 5%

TSA <= 5%

I know this mixes local police and federal, but from a federal standpoint high accuracy is no where near required nor expected. Even in local courtrooms it is amazing what little evidence is needed for a conviction (barring death penalty cases).

The law is not blind, for it is made of people, people who's sight and biases judge their decisions, who then judge your fate.

curiositie · 20時間前

Oh, I'm on /r/news.

I thought I was on /r/rage for a minute.

Still, what the fuck.

TiberiusBlaster · 15時間前

I deal with cases like this every day. This is a symptom of the problem in the American Justice System. Evidence gets suppressed because of the "exclusionary rule". When police do bad things, courts are supposed to punish them by excluding the evidence they find. This is supposed to prevent the police from violating your rights in the future. This is how it is supposed to work.

In practice, Court's have become less and less likely to do this. Judges get into trouble for letting guilty people go by suppressing the illegally obtained evidence. They do not get into legal trouble, they get in trouble with the public and with their colleagues. They are pressured by executive branch politicians to produce convictions.

The result is nowadays that anytime there is a 4th amendment violation judges will break their backs to try and find a way around the exclusionary rule. An example of this is that a search will be upheld if the officer accidentally violated your 4th Amendment rights. If the officer though he saw a kilo of cocaine in your car, yet there was none, his search would still be upheld despite the fact that he never actually saw anything that would give him probable cause to believe you had drugs.

The 4th Amendment has been whittled away to almost nothing by chickenshit judges.

Chiefhammerprime · 20時間前

The courts in this country exist solely to further the interests of bigger, larger, and more powerful government. They haven't served their function of checking and balancing the other branches of government since FDR threatened to stack the Supreme Court prior to passage of New Deal legislation.

Every time you see a cop violate someone's rights, its because he knows the courts have his back. It isn't just other cops.

EctoplasmTourniquet · 22時間前

they've got to recoup their investment in the dog somehow

live_a_little · 19時間前

I have a very relevant personal story:

I was driving one day with a loaded bowl (like a couple hits worth) of weed in my car and got pulled over for going 10 above the speed limit. The officer took my license, then came back to the car to give me a warning and let me go, when he noticed some seeds on my dashboard. These seeds were in fact SESAME SEEDS from the everything bagel I had for breakfast on my commute that morning, but he didn't want to hear that and had already made up his mind that this was worth a search. I was asked to allow a search of my vehicle and I refused. Then, I was asked to get out of the vehicle, so they could search me for weapons and wait for the drug dogs to come.

I was pretty nervous at this point, and all I could think about was how I was going to explain this to my wife's family, who I was supposed to be meeting for dinner. As I got patted down, the officer asked if I had any weapons on me, which of course I answered "no" to, which made it really awkward when he found the box cutter in the back pocket of my jeans. I worked in shipping and had completely forgotten about it. Then, it was 10 minutes of humiliation as I stood next to the officers on the shoulder of the busiest road in town, waiting for the drug dog to send me to jail.

5 minutes later, the dog is returned to the squad car and the officers exchange a few whispered words with each other. Then, the officer that detained me turns to me and says, "The dog didn't mark. You're free to go." I stood, shocked for a second, but tried to play it cool, like I knew that was gonna happen.

As I sat in my car, pulling myself together before taking off, the K9 unit officer taps on my window, scaring the shit out of me. He asked me to roll the window down, and then I had the weirdest conversation ever:

OFFICER: "Hey, I just wanted to ask you, did you have any drugs in the car that we should have found?"

ME: "Uh....what?"

OFFICER: "Did you have any marijuana in the car today or recently?"

ME: "Umm....I'm not sure what you're asking."

OFFICER: "Well, we've been having trouble with our dogs recently and we're just trying to train them better. You won't get in any trouble." (yeah right, a likely story)

ME: "Oh. Um. Yes." (WHAT?! WHY DID I SAY THIS!?!?)

OFFICER: "You did have drugs in the car?"

ME: "Yes." (Totally could've played this one off, but I didn't. WTF?)

OFFICER: "Okay. Have a nice day."

ME: ...

Needless to say, I never broke a single driving law on that road again.

nightlyraider · 20時間前

there has always been something troubling to me about the power of an officer claiming to smell pot could be. drug dogs with an even stronger nose and improper training can be much worse.

i appreciate the powerful senses the dogs have, but absolutely hate the idea that "because he/she says so" is reason enough for a warrant; consistently.

I3lizzard · 20時間前

They don't need a dog that can identify drugs. They need a cute excuse to search you without a warrant.

"Yep yep, he's uhh, indicating there. What do you have in your bag sir?"

Hi-Fi_Jacob · 20時間前

Fuck the police, as usual.

0_________________ · 20時間前

I think it's more impressive that they've trained dogs to authorize searches and subvert citizen's constitutional rights.

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