Supreme Court Hearing Case On Drug-Sniffing Dog "Fishing Expeditions" 451
sgunhouse writes "Wired is running an article on a Supreme Court challenge (well, actually two of them) to the use of drug-sniffing dogs. The first case discussed involved Florida police using a drug-sniffing dog as a basis for searching a suspected drug dealer's home. The court in Florida excluded the evidence obtained from the search, saying a warrant should be required for that sort of use of a dog. Personally, I agree — police have no right to parade a dog around on private property on a 'fishing expedition', same as they need a warrant to use a thermal imaging device to search for grow houses. I have no use for recreational drugs, but they had better have a warrant if they want to bring a dog onto my property."
Re:police should be reactive (Score:5, Insightful)
The organized crime will do far more damage then any pot smoker anyway.
Re:Did the cop got fired? (Score:2, Insightful)
It's not grey area, if the cops are trespassing on your property to make use of the dogs, why not let them go all the way around the house and peer in your windows? It's one thing to look through windows from a publicly accessible vantage point, and quite another to trespass in order to peer in.
Where to draw the line (Score:5, Insightful)
As to whether getting a warrant based on a sniffer dog is right. It really is hard to say; personally I think there should be a standard of a reasonable expectation of privacy but that becomes very hard to define. If a police officer overheard a conversation about bomb making through an open window when passing should it not be investigated? How about a large quantity of peroxide bottles left next to a bin visible at the side of the house. If a dog trained to detect explosives goes batshit crazy outside of a house should it be ignored? Most people accept that things that can be seen or heard from public property aren't private; how about if they are only visible/audible if using advanced equipment and manipulation (to for example filter sound). Is a smell emanating from a property supposed to be ignored? I doubt the police officer who ignored a strong burning smell and left someone to die would be praised.
Re:Unwarranted police trespass? (Score:4, Insightful)
Shoot 'em.
Sweet! An internet tough guy thread!
Hey guys, I'm after advice.
I want to tool up to blast the varmints to kindome come when the police state invades my castle!
Should I go for the 24.8" [wikipedia.org] calibre one or the smaller calibre, but faster firing one [wikipedia.org]?
Yes the cops need due process. No, there's no reason for pot to be illegal. Yes, it should be legal to blast to hell an unidentified intruder who busts into your house even if they later turn out to be cops, since you had no way of knowing and yes, that's a great way to get either killed on the spot or suffer a mysterious accident in custody.
Re:Where to draw the line (Score:5, Insightful)
it isn't up to them to set the law or decide which laws they decide to enforce.
The hell it isnt. The police are moral actors and "just following orders" is not and has never been an acceptable excuse.
Re:Warrant for looking at your house with IR? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a difficult problem in the US. Although marijuana is illegal here it is by far the number one cash crop [drugscience.org] in the US - ahead of wheat, barley, corn, soybeans and everything else. It is also one of our largest imports and a significant portion of our balance of international trade. Somehow we have not learned the lessons of prohibition. [wikipedia.org]
I don't care for the product myself but man, this is crazy.
Re:USA Land of Crime (Score:5, Insightful)
It's pretty simple, really. Throwing out evidence that was illegally acquired is the only tool available to ensure that evidence is not illegally acquired. After a team of police officers, investigators and lawyers have been working on a case, putting their efforts into it, they do not want to have the case fall apart, so there is, theoretically, some peer pressure on them not to screw up the evidence.
Without this incentive not to break the law, we would have police going house to house, knocking on doors, busting down the doors that don't open to them, and performing full-house searches, just looking for something, anything, to create criminal cases on. We had this in our pre-revolutionary state, and our Constitution was written to prevent it, amongst other abuses.
Re:USA Land of Crime (Score:4, Insightful)
In the rest of the world, people generally live under oppressive regimes who don't think twice about breaking their own laws to obtain or manufacture evidence to convict people they perceive as enemies of the State.
In the USA, the rights of the individual are protected unlike anywhere else in the world. Your attitude indicates you have never lived under a free system, because if you had, your own opinion would be repugnant to you.
I would rather see 100 guilty men go free than see one innocent person convicted, and that is precisely the way our system is designed - to place the importance of preserving an innocent man's freedom above the importance of taking away a guilty man's freedom.
Re:Did the cop got fired? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Did the cop got fired? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Did the cop got fired? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nice try, boozer (Score:2, Insightful)
You can try and invent imaginary rights and legal rulings to justify drug use, but at the end of the day, it's dumb.
I would need a lot of convincing to understand why the police would need to get PERMISSION to use IR gear in public to find grow houses (as if the IR signature of your house has some kind of right to privacy): they do it all the time in the UK, and only bikers, gangsters, druggies and idiots would have a problem with it.
First off: All Right Are Imaginary. They're fairly arbitrary as well. Fuck your perception of which "rights" others should have. This is about wasting money on pointless witch-hunts to me. I want them to get a permit before they spend my tax money to fly their helicopters at night over my house while they're distracted by thermal imaging. That permit needs to be issued by a judge after considering evidence that warrants the investigation, not green-lighted based on a whim.
Furthermore: Alcohol is a Drug. Now, let's recall Prohibition. The laws against alcohol made it possible for Mobs to make mad cash. When's the last time you bought booze from a gangster? It's not profitable for them to sell it... It doesn't take a brain scientist to figure out that laws against the substances that the general public find acceptable for recreational use create a big problem.
The government doesn't want to end the war on drugs. The War on Terror will never end either. They want the power to do whatever the fuck they want -- Which means turning your country into a Dystopia like the old USSR. See also: Homeland Security & TSA. Blindly trusting your government to use restraint with absolute power is fucking moronic.
Re:As good as lie detectors? (Score:5, Insightful)
Dogs have an almost insanely good sense of smell. For a dog to smell a bag of narcotics is about as hard as for you to smell if somebody opened a bottle of ammonia under your nose. The big problem is getting the smell out of your nose.
Training a drug sniffing (or any type of ID dog) involves teaching the dog first to identify a number of substances and then "mark" them. Marking is typically done either by the dog freezing and pointing with the nose, or sitting down. For a dog to be qualified you have a number of tests. Tests here involves the dog having to search 12 people, some of whom who may carry narcotics. Those not carrying narcotics get identical objects to hide on their persons. The handler, and the person holding the object, does not know if it is the real deal or not until after the test. If the dog misses a person, or marks the wrong person, it, and the handler, fails to qualify. And, yes, it's not unusual with a lineup where nobody carries anything.
A similar test often used is when a luggage band at an airport, where the dog must mark the specific bags containing explosives or narcotics. So the dogs and handlers certainly have to prove that they are able both to identify the substance and and that they know when it's not there.
Dogs are not infallible.They get tired, bored and exhausted just like their handlers. But it's not just a matter of a 'trained' officer having an 'opinion' about if the dog found something.
Re:Did the cop got fired? (Score:3, Insightful)
You mean the "Clever Hans" effect where the handler provides the cues instead of the smell? It's a know issue, both handlers and dogs are trained to try and avoid it.
Oh, they are trained for it alright. The problem is, the pigs actually follow that training.
You have the internet, go look up some of the anecdotal stories of people watching the pigs sniff around their cars at a traffic stop for mounds of first impressions "gee, it sorta looked like the handler ordered the dog to signal", for the pigs to then find nothing after turning out and partially destroying the contents of the car.
Re:Warrant for looking at your house with IR? (Score:1, Insightful)
If it was legal the price would drop significantly because the risk in dealing would be removed, and it probably wouldn't be the biggest cash crop anymore.
Re:Did the cop got fired? (Score:2, Insightful)
It's easy, you smell someone smoking pot, and look for the guy puffing away on his fatty sitting on the front porch. Some days at the grocery store I almost get a contact high from the potheads on a munchy run.
Wait, I'm being insensitive... The "medical patients" who are taking their "medication".
I don't want pot to be illegal, but it needs to be regulated like alcohol. If you go to the store drunk as hell it is as rude as going there completely baked, and you have a major problem if you do that.
I just wish the stupid republicans would stop being turd sandwiches and just make it legal and wrap it into the Tobacco and Alcohol rules.
Re:police should be reactive (Score:2, Insightful)
>If the criminals are organized enough we call it a Government.
Or a corporation.
Frankly these days the differences are getting too small to matter.
Re:Did the cop got fired? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you aren't doing anything illegal, you have nothing to worry about
If you aren't doing anything illegal and the present and all future authorities are completely benign and the present and all future authorities never make mistakes, you have nothing to worry about..
Worried yet?
Re:Did the cop got fired? (Score:3, Insightful)
Wait isn't the president a democrat? Has he recommended legalizing medical marijuana? Did harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi bring this to the floors for a vote when they had a majority?
How about the head of the DEA? [youtube.com] She looks like shes on drugs.
Yes, it's just the stupid republicans.
Re:Warrant for looking at your house with IR? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Better have a a warrent or what? (Score:4, Insightful)
Wikipedia has a list of people killed by police in the UK. If you discount the ones that happened in Northern Ireland during The Troubles, it has a grand total of 15 people killed by police since 1920.
I do not feel scared by that number.
I'm not sure which numbers you were looking at, but I think they are rather a lot higher than that, even if not officially acknowledged as such. Possibly you have confused "being shot by the police" with "being killed by the police" (although even then the number is far, far higher than that).
Between 2000 and 2011 there were nearly 6,000 deaths in police custody [independent.gov.uk] in the UK. Now, some (perhaps even many or most) of those will be unavoidable - perhaps people who would have died anyway even if not in police custody. Then, some are down to negligence (although I'd argue that in many case that is just as bad as malfeasance - if I was at home and vulnerable to some medical condition e.g. diabetes then it's much more likely someone would be around who would watch and look after me properly). But I find it very difficult to believe that given such a large number of cases there is no significant element of either bad intent or intentinoal recklessness, because it really is a shockingly high number - for context, it is not terribly far off the total number of murders recorded in the UK in the same period.
Looking just at shootings - there seem to be on average about 6 or 7 a year in recent years - e.g. here is a list [dailymail.co.uk] of some of them. There are in fact multiple recent cases where the police have literally shot naked and unarmed people (and faced only relatively minor consequences as a result) and several more where they have shot unarmed people. Even in this case [wikipedia.org], which would appear to be about as clear-cut a case as they come, the officers were acquitted and retained their jobs in the police, albeit not on firearm duties.
Finally, I'd like to say that the fact that police can apparently get away with murder should worry you, for two reasons. Firstly - not because you might be murdered by the police yourself (that is still very unlikely), but because it means they might be likely to get away with far lesser crimes (like assaulting you, planting drugs on you, or making up a traffic offence because they decide they don't like the look of you) much more easily. Secondly - because it is indicative of a force who don't see their primary loyalty as being to the victims of crime (and to thus solving crime) but rather to looking after their own. If you were a victim of crime, would you want a force where the officers thought people who didn't pull their weight to solve it effectively should be protected from public scrutiny?
If anything, we should be holding police officers, especially firearms officers, to a higher standard than we do the general public because we grant them additional powers and privileges and entrust them to use those responsibly while paying them out of the public purse.
Re:Did the cop got fired? (Score:5, Insightful)
Much like homoeopaths are trained to avoid the placebo effect?
As long as they don't send the dogs in alone without communicating with them, I don't think they can get away from the effect being attributable to the handler [springerlink.com].
Re:Did the cop got fired? (Score:5, Insightful)
Thanks for posting that, as I was reading comments I clearly remembered reading studies on dog based detection and particularly the ones talked about here (lol only 21 of 144 walkthroughs successfully detected nothing, with the rest generating an average of around 2 false positives per search!)
These numbers say to me that these dogs are little more than props which give excuses. A sort of dowsing rod for drugs.
Re:Better have a a warrent or what? (Score:2, Insightful)
The 6,000 deaths is in state custody, not police custody. The majority of those are in-patient mental health setting, while prisons make up the next largest number. Police custody only had 294 death over those 10 years. Many of the deaths in prisons or mental-health settings are likely problematic, but they're not the fault of police.
Re:As good as lie detectors? (Score:2, Insightful)
"Marking is typically done either by the dog freezing and pointing with the nose, or sitting down."
Behavior that could be taught as a trained response to any number of stimuli, including a voice command. The point being that officer friendly could trigger that same response with or without drugs being present.
"it's not just a matter of a 'trained' officer having an 'opinion' about if the dog found something."
You can't cross-examine the dog, so it is entirely a matter of the officer interpreting the dog's response.
Re:police should be reactive (Score:2, Insightful)
Nobody expects it would disappear immediately (ignoring of course the various other non-weed drugs they run). However, their income would be drastically slashed, since if what I remember is correct, most of their profit comes from weed. And of course they wouldn't stop running THAT either, but if people are given the choice between good weed grown... wherever locally or something, and old, hard-packed brick weed brought about by the murder of countless people... they will go with whatever is cheaper naturally (since people don't give the slightest of two shits if people not directly associated with them are dying by the hundreds).
However... locally grown stuff will (in theory) be cheaper, simply due to less shipping costs. So that option would be preferable. Thus slashing the drug lords profits. Or at least until they move deeper into the USA and start killing people with farms... but at least that's moreso in the USA's jurisdiction, and might actually be fought back somewhat.
Re:Did the cop got fired? (Score:4, Insightful)
One only hopes the "pigs" ignore you when you call 911 when someone is breaking into your house.
So they can show up 20 minutes too late? No thanks.
If you're smart, the only reason you would need to call 911 after a break in is to let them know where to come pick up the bodies.
Re:Did the cop got fired? (Score:4, Insightful)
An illustrative case: Seattle Policeman Ian Birk approaches a 50-year-old man named John T Williams in broad daylight on a public street. Williams' crime? Carrying a woodcarving knife, shuffling along and minding his own business. No witness other than Birk thought Williams presented any kind of threat. Birk spends approximately 3-4 seconds yelling at Williams to drop the knife (never identifying himself as police), then shoots Williams 4 times in the back from about 15 feet away as the mostly deaf Williams had stopped to try to figure out what was going on.
In the aftermath, Birk was cleared of all charges. However, after lots of public outcry and the police department saying that he violated regulations, Birk decided to quit.
A better case for the re-emergence of lynch mobs, I have not heard.
Re:Did the cop got fired? (Score:4, Insightful)
There are approximately 4,450 federal crimes, and that doesn't include state, county, and city crimes. You are almost surely a criminal, and you don't even know it. In my town many people have gotten snagged for throwing away a water heater, or the box it came in. That is not illegal, however it is illegal to replace a water heater without having a city inspection. The fine is thousands of dollars, and then you have to bring up everything to code in your house for your water heater. Now people throw water heaters and boxes in their neighbors dumpsters. How would you feel if the police saw that in your alley from someone else, and decided to bust your door down, and found an illegally replaced heater from the previous owner of your house putting you on the hook for thousands of dollars?
People just don't think this shit through.
Re:Warrant for looking at your house with IR? (Score:2, Insightful)
"In many states, revenue from alcohol/cigarette taxes are a major portion of the state's revenue."
Which is a crime. Or should be. There is no moral / ethical basis for this. It is not the place of Government to tell us what to do, and enforce it through the pocketbook.
WE are supposed to tell the government what to do. That is what is meant by "the only legitimate government is by the consent of the governed."
Re:This is why we threw the British out (Score:4, Insightful)
America is peculiar, in that unlike the rest of the world, it has the bizarre hyper-individualistic quasi-religion of virtually unlimited freedom without responsibility.
Not at all. When you infringe on the rights of others, you should be held accountable. Nothing about the production, possession, or consumption of Cannabis infringes on anyones rights.
Only a truly deluded Slashdot libertarian keyboard warrior would think that giving police powers to investigate suspicious activity would somehow violate their "rights" to break the law, be antisocial, and attack the common good, as if the "common good" didn't matter.
Only a truly deluded fascist would think that Cannabis prohibition has anything to do with the common good, as Cannabis has been repeatedly shown to be less harmful on every measure than substances we tolerate happily. It's less addictive than caffeine. Less toxic than aspirin. It's more weakly correlated with mental illness than cat ownership.
No, Cannabis prohibition has nothing to do with the common good, and everything to do with giving the authorities a blanket excuse to persecute undesirables. This is why the US has more black men in chains today than it ever had under slavery. This is why drug dogs magically get less accurate when the suspect is hispanic. And this is congruent with the historical record. Cannabis prohibition was sold to the public based on racism. It was racist in the thirties, and it's racist today.
What's morally bankrupt is promoting a policy for the "common good" when it's so demontrably harmful, and refusing to seriously consider alternatives to that policy.
Re:If you care your probably in wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
YOU are the enemy.