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Comment by vedtopkar | Hacker News Reader

It's shocking to me that something so critical to the criminal justice system is not more tightly regulated nor monitored continuously for sensitivity/specificity.

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Given courts have ruled drug dogs don’t need to be tested for accuracy or to make sure they’re not influenced by their handlers this isn’t very surprising.

Seems like the more I learn about the system the more of a scam it seems.

Speaking of which Serial season 3 just started which covers this kind of stuff, more in the small than a grand ‘Thing X is the problem we want solved that will make things much better’.

I don't quite follow. Why would drug dogs need to be tested for accuracy? Is the indication of a dog accepted somewhere as evidence?

I have been assuming that dogs give false positives every now and then, and there's a search for some actual evidence based on that indication, which everyone knows can be a false positive.

When the dog's accuracy can't be tested, then a search based on the dog giving an indication of "There are drugs here" is no different then a search based on a magic 8-ball giving an indication of "There are drugs here".

Every time this technique leads to a search that is used to secure a conviction, it erodes your rights, as a non-criminal, against arbitrary search and seizure.

There's a difference in the way people see this here in Europe, because here a "probable cause" is not needed for searching for drugs. Particularly at the border controls, everyone is subject to searches.

(Same applies for e.g. DUI testing on the roads; the police has the right to take alcohol test of any driver, without anyone looking like they're driving badly.)

Any arbitrary seizure, if only based on dog indication, is of course a horrible miscarriage of justice.

Borders are civil liberty free zones, by design. As are warzones, places that have declared martial law, and prisons.

DUI testing is different. In many jurisdictions you do not have to submit to it, if you are fine with losing your driving privileges - which is not a criminal penalty.

I'm not super pleased about it, but there is typically a clear line - some voluntary behavior voids your liberties. Involuntary behavior generally should not.

A drug dog indicating is considered probable cause for a search.

Dogs are routinely used to bypass the 4th amendment against unlawful search and seizure. They are a "probable cause" machine, since all that needs to happen is that the dog gets excited. Without the dog, it could be argued that those pieces of evidence were obtained without probable cause for a search, in which case they would be discarded.

So you're a cop and you want to search someone, but don't have the legal basis to do so? Go get the dog and get him excited.

It is awful, but keep in mind, this is a system where "eyewitness testimony" was the gold standard.

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