War on Drugs

Supreme Court upholds the use of drug sniffing dogs as probable cause for a search. One problem is the police interpret whether the dog alerted or not. The dog could just sit there, but if the cop says it alerted, that's probable cause for a search. Another problem is the dogs aren't as accurate as claimed.

"Drug-detecting dogs are much less reliable than widely believed, with false-positive error rates as high as 96 percent in the field. A 2006 Australian study found that the rate of unverified alerts by 17 police dogs used to sniff out drugs on people ranged from 44 percent to 93 percent."

Those numbers make them useless. Here's another big problem.

"So does the possibility that a dog will react to smell-alike odors from legal substances, distractions such as food, or cues from their handlers."

Cues from handlers can make it appear the dog is alerting on drugs when he's actually responding to his handler. Here's what this is really about:

"Instead of requiring police to demonstrate that a dog is reliable, this decision puts the burden on the defense to show the dog is not reliable through expert testimony and other evidence that casts doubt on the training and testing methods used by police. But experts are expensive, and police control all the relevant evidence."

Now only rich people can afford to challenge the dog. But you can't count on police to keep accurate records anyway. Every dog should be challenged in the courtroom, but judges don't want to take time to do that. Here's another terrible effect.

"The Court previously has said that police may use drug-sniffing dogs at will during routine traffic stops and may search cars without a warrant, based on their own determination of probable cause. Now that it has said a dog's alert by itself suffices for probable cause, a cop with a dog has the practical power to search the car of anyone who strikes him as suspicious."

All it takes is for a cop to show up with a dog, and they can search any and all cars they want.

"Even the question of whether a dog did in fact alert may be impossible to resolve if there is no video record of the encounter, which is often the case. As Florida defense attorney Jeff Weiner puts it, the justices "have given law enforcement a green light to do away with the Fourth Amendment merely by uttering the magic words, 'My dog alerted.'""

That's right.