Dog searches should require consent or a warrant, IMO. Too many cases where the dog is "alerting" based on cues from the handler and not an actual presence of any substances.
You cannot interrogate the dog to discern why it alerted thus its "testimony" should be legally useless. It's not an instrument and it cannot be standardized and police departments and cops will always be incentivized to use them poorly as using it poorly will always garner more hits.
Dog sniff tests like lie detectors should just be forbidden from being used in any capacity like every other pseudo scientific instrument.
I was with you until the last sentence. Dogs work fine when the handler does not have preconceptions: when there is no suspect present. This is appropriate in customs enforcement for mail and luggage. It is never appropriate as a criterion for suspecting a present human, because the human-human interaction will influence the dog.
The problem is that dogs have evolved to please humans and humans are very biased.
they could work fine, but the incentives are never aligned. Therefore, they should never be used to substantiate a search. Need to search a home that already has a warrant? Bring the dog. Need to find a bomb at the high school? Bring the dog. But don't ever allow the dog to be the reason for a search. You just can't trust the human it's connected to.
But the only thing they had to suspect Wendy Farris of was being a responsible motorist in stopping when too tired to drive safely. Maybe a breathalyser test could be warranted just to be safe, and if passed apologise for wasting her time.
It sounds like the officers were either running a scam or were just looking for people to harass as make-work. “Field sobriety test”, what is that even? Sounds like a total scam.
Field sobriety tests are actually pretty reasonable. They're basically a collection of physical and mental tests that can pretty accurately determine impairment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_sobriety_testing is pretty good, but the TLDR is that they use things like the ability for your eyes to smoothly track a moving object, or the ability to stand on 1 foot for 30 seconds while counting. They aren't perfect, but they're pretty reliable as a way of screening people.
IMO the bigger scam is the number of baseless infractions that cops can use to pull you over in the first place. If a cop wants to pull you over, they can find a reason if they follow you for a few minutes.
How do sobriety tests work with people with disabilities that don't themselves prevent the individual from driving? Hint often not well. If you can afford competent counsel you may well get the case tossed out if there isn't any actual evidence of impairment after they try to coerce you with threats of scary long prison sentences.
If there is anything that sounds reasonable about law enforcement in America cops all over America will nearly without a doubt find a way to make it unreasonable.
Field sobriety tests are 100% bullshit. They are purposefully designed so that the officer can administer the test, you can do everything he says perfectly, and then the officer can write a police report making it look like you failed without technically contradicting the facts.
For example they'll tell you to walk the white line. You'll do it easily. Then they'll tell you to do something else. Then they'll write in the report you failed to remain on the white line for the second task even though it was obvious from the context that wasn't the intention of the officer. The prosecutor will ask the cop on the stand "did you ever tell the defendant to get off the white line" and they'll be able to truthfully say no.
> Dog sniff tests like lie detectors should just be forbidden from being used in any capacity like every other pseudo scientific instrument.
This seems like an overreaction. Surely we'd want an explosives sniffing dog walking around at the Boston Marathon, for example. There is abuse when bad cops use $TOOL, but that doesn't mean that there are no legitimate uses for $TOOL. The proper fix is to create a legal and social culture in which government officials of any kind are held to a high moral standard.
Certifications mean nothing when a dog can be trained to give false positives when certain people want them to.
It's not like dogs are machines, even small amount of unstructured positive and negative reinforcement can distract a dog from what it was trained to do.
They don’t really make sense as evidence, anymore than the policeman’s torch or magnifying glass is evidence of anything. The dog is there just to give a hint where to start looking for the drugs.
If the Americans manage to clear up this category error, they won’t want to use these defective dogs any more than they’d want to use a dim torch or a cracked magnifying glass.
They wouldn't have qualified immunity and their certifications would be questionable in court. That does not assure perfection, but it would be better than what we have now.
Excellent point. For those who don't read latin or want to google translate it, the literal latin translation is:
"Who will guard the guards themselves"
The phrase is more commonly translated as:
"Who will watch the watchers"
Someone with a good understanding of Latin could use this thread as an opportunity to make a Latin joke, by translating "Who will watch the watchdogs?" or "Who will guard the guard dogs?".
Forbidding sniff tests from being used as evidence themselves or cause for further searches is likeliest to result in a just outcome. Sometimes the best answer to who watches the watcher is to simplify by eliminating the position.
It's basically never in your interest to consent to a search. By consenting the only thing you're really saying is "I voluntarily surrender my rights to object to anything you claim you found." Refusing consent may not stop a search (police may decide that refusing consent is suspicious therefore probable cause!), but it may help you retain opportunities for later legal recourse.
When you are the target (either current or upcoming) of crime and denying or delaying police access to evidence prevents them from dealing with it.
The simplest case is when you wee the obvious target of the past crime the police are investigating and it might recur or escalate, hence why people who don’t have a particular expectation of police animus tend to report crimes and freely cooperate with police in investigating them.
But this can be true even where you aren’t the obvious past victim.
Then why would the police need to search you, as opposed to you offering up evidence for them to write a crime scene report? And in this article's context of drug search dogs?
If police already are intent on searching you... then you are a subject of investigation.
> Then why would the police need to search you, as opposed to you offering up evidence for them to write a crime scene report?
In the simple case where you know that you are the obvious past target of crime...actually, they still might ask for consent to search beyond what you have initially offered up.
> If police already are intent on searching you... then you are a subject of investigation.
That’s probably technically true, but only because you used a word that you probably didn’t mean; basically, anyone whose conduct is on any way relevant to an investigation is a “subject”, you seem to intend to refer to a “target”.
But even if you are actually a target, unless you are maliciously targeted (which for sure happens far more than it should), inhibiting the investigation may just make you a target longer rather than getting LE to revise its theory of the crime. And the most likely people to be mistakenly-but-not-maliciously targeted (and also the nob-targets most likely to be subjects) are people with some other nexus to the crime, including people who might be in danger from it.
No, the answer is "no, I do not consent" then they would have to get a judge to sign off on a warrant just like if they wanted to search your house. And at that point, they don't need the dog, they can just search your car.
Agreed. Humans don't even let humans of foreign citizenship into law enforcement, so it makes even less sense to let another species make decisions about law enforcement.
Accuracy: dog alerted -> no drugs found -> dog was incorrect, hence inaccurate
I consider 95% to be highly accurate and reasonably acceptable, which is what I'd want in a drug dog. But I have no knowledge of what it should be, I'm not a dog expert. That's who I'd ask when making the determination of accuracy %. If it's anything less than 95%, though, I'd remove dogs completely.
It is what I consider highly accurate and acceptable, and the chance I am willing to take. You are free to disagree. Just because the dog alerts doesn't immediately mean you are guilty.
The point of my comment is that there should be a standard at which the dogs have to meet.
