Pubdate: Fri, 26 Oct 2012
Source: Denver Post (CO)
Copyright: 2012 The Denver Post Corp
Contact:  http://www.denverpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/122
Author: Emily Bazelon
Note: Emily Bazelon is a senior editor for Slate and author of 
"Sticks and Stones: The New World of Bullying," which will be 
published next spring.

DO POLICE DOGS INVADE OUR PRIVACY?

When I see a police dog inside a train station or at a public 
gathering, I feel safer. I figure it is there to protect us from 
explosives, and if it sniffs out drugs along the way, well, that's 
against the law, too.

But what if it turns out that the dogs aren't all that good at the 
job the police are giving them? If that's the case, should we think 
differently about when the police should use dogs to sniff us and our 
belongings, especially in the privacy of the home?

That's the question in two cases being argued before the Supreme 
Court next week. In the first case, Florida vs. Jardines, Miami 
police used a trained detection dog named Franky to check for drugs 
at the home of Joelis Jardines after getting a Crime Stopper tip. Led 
onto the porch, Franky sat down by the front door, his sign for 
alerting his handler that something smelled funny. The police got a 
search warrant and found a potgrowing business inside the house.

In the second case, Florida vs. Harris, a sheriff's deputy pulled 
over Clayton Harris because the truck he was driving had an expired 
license plate. Harris was shaking and breathing fast, so the deputy 
asked for permission to search his truck. When Harris said no, the 
deputy brought his trained dog, Aldo, over to the truck, and Aldo 
alerted him to a smell on one of the door handles. With that as his 
basis for a search, the deputy looked inside the truck and found 
ingredients for making methamphetamine.

Both Jardines and Harris challenged the searches as violations of 
their Fourth Amendment rights. They argue that the police should have 
gotten a warrant before they deployed Franky and Aldo. Back in 1983, 
however, the Supreme Court said that a dog sniff isn't a search under 
the Fourth Amendment, which means the police don't need a warrant.

The idea was that dogs are sui generis as a detection method because 
the only information they can provide is the presence or absence of 
drugs. Since nothing else is revealed, there's no privacy at stake. 
Key to the court's reasoning was "the assumption that sniffing dogs 
do not err."

That's how Justice David Souter put it in 2005, in dissenting from 
another pro-dog ruling. Souter said, in response to the argument that 
dogs can only detect the presence or absence of drugs, that "the 
infallible dog, however, is a creature of legal fiction." Souter's 
best evidence was an Illinois study showing that trained dogs tasked 
with sniffing for drugs came up with false positives between 12 and 
60 percent of the time.

Another problem for gauging the reliability of canines is the bias of 
their handlers. Researchers have concluded that handlers cue their 
dogs, deliberately or not, and this affects the animals' accuracy.

Does that matter? It might if you're the Supreme Court deciding 
whether a dog can sniff the front door of a house without a warrant. 
In its own brief, the National Police Canine Association reports that 
in 21/2 years of service, Franky sniffed out narcotics in nearly 400 
of 656 cases, leading to the seizure of thousands of grams of 
cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and marijuana. We're not told the 
dog's rate of false positives. Instead, the canine association 
reassures us that when Franky didn't alert his handler to a scent, 
property owners were none the wiser - their privacy wasn't violated 
because they never knew their things had been sniffed.

But that, too, is questionable. Dogs cue to chemicals that are found 
in illegal drugs and also in all kinds of household products. Pickles 
and glue share an ingredient with heroin. Cocaine shares one with 
insecticides, perfume and food flavoring. In previous cases, the 
Supreme Court has ruled that the police must have a warrant to 
uncover intimate details at home-the temperature of the rooms in a 
house, for example.

Maybe we don't want dogs to come in without a warrant and tell the 
police what kind of perfume someone wears, either.
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