{"id":6916,"date":"2012-03-31T16:52:59","date_gmt":"2012-03-31T16:52:59","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2012-03-31T16:52:59","slug":"en-US","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/?p=6916","title":{"rendered":"HuffPo: “Illinois State Police Drug Dog Unit Analysis Shows Error Rate Between 28 and 74 Percent”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Huffington Post: Illinois State Police Drug Dog Unit Analysis Shows Error Rate Between 28 and 74 Percent<\/a>:<\/p>\n

In the course of reporting on the traffic stop of Terrance Huff, HuffPost was able to obtain the reports of an Illinois State Police K-9 unit over an 11-month period in 2007 and 2008. An analysis of those reports shows that only 25.7 percent of the drug dog “alerts” resulted in police finding a measurable quantity of illicit drugs. Just 13 percent resulted in the recovery of more than 10 grams of marijuana, generally considered an amount for personal use, and 10.4 percent turned up enough drugs to charge the motorists or their passengers with at least one felony.<\/p>\n

In all, the police dog conducted 252 “sniffs” over the 11-month period, resulting in 136 alerts. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that a drug dog’s alert is enough to establish probable cause for a warrantless search of a vehicle. Of the 136 alerts, 35 turned up a large enough quantity of drugs to merit an arrest, and 63 turned up what the police officer refers to as “shake,” or “residue.” The officer didn’t send any of those cases to a lab, so it’s difficult to know if what the officer found was actually drug residue or, as appears to have been the case in the search of Terrance Huff, likely something else. In 38 cases, or 27.9 percent of the times a dog alert gave cause for a more thorough search, the officer recorded finding no drugs at all. Still, in most of these cases, the officer still notes in the report that the driver or passengers looked to be under the influence of drugs or, somewhat improbably, admitted to him that they were regular drug users. Obviously, there’s no way to verify those claims.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

b2evALnk.b2WPAutP Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"pingsdone","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6916","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6916","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6916"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6916\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6916"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6916"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6916"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}