THE
STOP
The paper found that just 44 percent of
dog “alerts” led to the discovery of actual contraband. Interestingly, for Hispanic drivers the success rate dipped to
27 percent, again supporting the theory
that drug dogs tend to confirm the suspicions (and, consequently, the biases) of
their handlers.
A 2006 statistical analysis (PDF) of police dog tests by University of North Carolina law professor Richard Myers concluded that the dogs aren’t reliable enough to
provide probable cause for a search.
Huffington obtained the records for
one Illinois state police K-9 unit for an
11-month period in 2007 and 2008. Of
the 136 times this particular dog alerted
to the presence of drugs during a traffic
stop over that period, 35 of the subsequent hand searches found measurable
quantities of illegal drugs.
Jones, the former narcotics and K-9 officer, said those sorts of numbers are why
he now opposes the drug war. “Ninety
percent of these dog-handler teams are
utter failures. They’re just ways to get
around the Fourth Amendment,” he says.
“When I debate these people around the
country, I always challenge the K- 9 officers to a double-blind test to see how
accurate they and their dogs really are.
They always refuse.”
Government leaders appear to be
catching on. The police chief in Henry,
Tennessee, recently dropped the charade entirely. In August, Chief David An-
HUFFINGTON
10.21.12
drews persuaded the mayor and board
of aldermen to purchase a drug dog for
the department not because because he
wanted to get drugs off the streets, but
because a drug dog alert would bring in
lots of revenue from asset forfeiture.
These figures strongly suggest that
while the Supreme Court has ruled that
there’s nothing invasive about an exterior drug dog sniff of a car, in truth, the
dog’s alert may be nothing more than the
dog confirming its handler’s hunches —
which is exactly what the Fourth Amendment is supposed to protect against.
This term, the Supreme Court will revisit the issue in two cases. In Florida v.
Jardines the Court will consider whether
to expand its ruling in Caballes to allow
police to search homes after a drug dog
alert. And in Florida v. Harris, the court
will review a Florida Supreme Court decision that called the reliability of drug
dogs into question. The Florida court
ruled that a mere training certificate
wasn’t enough—law enforcement officials would need to demonstrate that the
dog was accurate and reliable.
THE BAD COP
If drug dog searches and poorly incentivized forfeiture policies are bad ideas in
general, both can be particularly damaging when utilized by an unscrupulous
police officer. And Michael Reichert has
both a reputation and a documented history of questionable scruples.
“All the departments around here are
bad when it comes to these searches, but
he’s really the poster boy,” says Rekows-