{"id":7917,"date":"2012-11-06T10:40:51","date_gmt":"2012-11-03T14:35:23","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"-0001-11-30T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2012-11-03T14:35:23","slug":"en-US","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/?p=7917","title":{"rendered":"Reason.com: “Why a Sensitive Dog Is an Evidence-Impaired Cop’s Best Friend”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reason.com: Why a Sensitive Dog Is an Evidence-Impaired Cop’s Best Friend<\/a> by Jacob Sullum:<\/p>\n

On Monday I noted the 2011 Chicago Tribune analysis of data from suburban police departments that found vehicle searches justified by a dog’s alert failed to turn up drugs or drug paraphernalia 56 percent of the time. A 2006 study by the New South Wales Ombudsman in Australia looked at more than 10,000 searches triggered by dog alerts and discovered that 74 percent of them found no illegal drugs. In other words, as the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) note in their Harris brief, “any given alert was almost three times more likely to be a false alert than an accurate one.” More-recent data from New South Wales indicate an even higher error rate: 80 percent.<\/p>\n

The NACDL and the ACLU also describe a 1984 operation in which Florida state police stopped about 1,330 vehicles at roadblocks and walked dogs around them. If one dog alerted, another was brought in, and vehicles were searched only if both dogs indicated the presence of illegal drugs. That happened 28 times, but those searches yielded just one drug arrest. “Despite the requirement that two dogs alert before a search,” the NACDL\/ACLU brief notes, “police found illegal narcotics sufficient to justify an arrest in only 4% of cars searched,” meaning “the likelihood of a false alert was approximately 96%.” With impressive chutzpah, Florida’s lawyers claim “this example at most shows a ‘false’ alert rate under 2%.” You see what they did there? Twenty-seven false alerts divided by 1,330 cars equals 2 percent. But the relevant question is not the percentage of vehicle stops that resulted in a false alert; it is the percentage of alerts (in this case, double alerts) that turned out to be false. For purposes of probable cause, we want to know the likelihood that a search triggered by a dog’s alert will find drugs. In this case it was 4 percent\u2014not, as Florida’s tricky calculation implies, 98 percent.\n<\/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-7917","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7917","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=7917"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7917\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7917"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7917"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/fourthamendment.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7917"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}