Drug dogs are certified in only two states and yet they are being used in ever increasing numbers across the U. S.

“I’ve heard that there are as many as 18,000 police service dogs working in this country, doing narcotics control, explosives, tracking,” says Terry Anderson, president of the National Police Canine Association, an organization that trains and certifies police dogs and their handlers. But while these police dogs and their counterparts in the private sector bury their super-sensitive snouts into our business, who’s watching them? Certification is largely optional. “There’s only two states in this country that say if you want to have a police dog, these are the criteria you have to meet,” says Anderson, who also serves as a police officer in Pasadena, Texas.

While neither the federal government nor most states impose or even suggest standards for selecting, training, or evaluating detection dogs, the highest courts of the land give them plenty of leash when it comes to privacy rights. That started in 1983, when Justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote in U.S. v. Place that a canine sniff of luggage at an airport is so limited—in both its intrusiveness and in what it could disclose—that it doesn’t qualify as a search within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment, which bars “unreasonable searches and seizures.” A detection dog would only alert if a piece of luggage contained contraband, O’Connor opined, and contraband wasn’t subject to privacy protections.

Since then we’ve learned that detection dogs aren’t infallible. During a 1994 search that took place at a high school in Harborcreek Township, Pennsylvania, for example, a drug dog sniffed 2,000 school lockers and indicated that 18 of them contained contraband. Only one actually did.

Such incidents have done little to damage the reputation of drug dogs among the animal lovers on the Supreme Court. In the 2005 case Illinois v. Caballes, the Court ruled that a canine sniff for narcotics at a traffic stop was not a search, even when there was no reasonable cause for suspicion. In writing the opinion for the majority, Justice John Paul Stevens further enhanced the power of drug dogs by claiming that even their false alerts are no cause for concern, because no “legitimate private information” is conveyed when they indicate the presence or absence of contraband material.

But if a false alert reveals no legitimate private information, it does pave the way for a search that can do exactly that. In a 2005 essay for the NYU Journal of Law & Liberty, criminal defense attorney Ken Lammers translated Justice Stevens’ dubious argument into plainer language: “It is as if Justice Stevens had upheld a warrant by arguing: ‘When Officer Smith lied to Judge Jones in order to get the warrant, the lie, in and of itself, did not reveal any legitimate private information, and therefore the warrant is valid.’ ”

Imagine a world where meter maids provisioned with drug dogs routinely check your car for cocaine, where postal carriers and their drug dogs give your front porch a good going-over on occasion. This, essentially, is what Illinois v. Caballes makes possible, and as Lammers noted in his essay, “these types of canine searches are already taking place.” The venue? Schools like Temple City High.



Link: http://reason.com/archives/2011/02/17/the-mans-best-friend