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Comment by etjossem | Hacker News Reader

Before you tell your friends that Jay-Z has only 98 problems now: Rodriguez v. US doesn't say a dog sniff can't be part of a traffic stop.

Alito mentioned in a separate dissent that - as a result of this ruling - he expects officers to change the sequence the activities involved in a traffic stop so that the license check and citation are not completed until a dog sniff is done. This ruling may be a bit of a moot point, except in cases where officers don't follow the proscribed sequence of events.

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Read the opinion carefully, it explicitly says that the order of events is not justification enough. You are right in saying that this doesn't prohibit dog sniffs in all traffic stops. Period. However, you are wrong that stating that a dog sniff can be justified by simple ordering, see page 8:

>>The critical question, then, is not whether the dog sniff occurs before or after the officer issues a ticket, as JUSTICE ALITO supposes, post, at 2–4, but whether conducting the sniff “prolongs”—i.e., adds time to—“the stop,” supra, at 6.

and page 7:

>>a dog sniff, unlike the routine measures just mentioned, is not an ordinary incident of a traffic stop

SCOTUS is in fact saying that a dog sniff must be supported by what they call "individualized suspicion".

>>a dog sniff, unlike the routine measures just mentioned, is not an ordinary incident of a traffic stop

Alito's dissent states that a preliminary dog sniff will become an ordinary incident as a result of this ruling. It will be the new standard procedure for K-9 officers who initiate traffic stops. A future Officer Struble will simply get the dog out first for everyone he stops, post Rodriguez and a bit of officer training.

Officers that don't have a dog in the back will still have to establish reasonable suspicion to call in a K-9 sniff, just as they did before the ruling. So I can't see this ruling having an impact for longer than it takes to re-train officers.

> If it's an ordinary incident of a K-9 traffic stop, it's not prolonging the stop.

Its still a search not reasonably related to the justification of the stop, which would seem to make it unreasonable as an ordinary procedure. Sure, Scalia might vote to uphold it, but if Scalia's view was controlling he wouldn't need to.

The Court has held that dog sniffs are not searches; they only reveal whether contraband is present. Unlike wiretaps, physical searches of houses, etc. there's no privacy concern.

The issue here was that everything necessary to complete the traffic stop was finished, and by conducting an additional dog sniff (or doing anything else, really), the officer did something out of the ordinary to prolong the stop.

The Court has held that dog sniffs are not searches; they only reveal whether contraband is present. Unlike wiretaps, physical searches of houses, etc. there's no privacy concern.

If dogs alert based on officer cues as often as they do for illicit substances, then once the science makes its way into the legal consciousness this ruling will have to change. Note: I couldn't find the right search terms to get a good reference, only a prior mention: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7180985

Edit: another comment in this thread has a better link: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9418172

Downvoter: you probably disagree with the Court's interpretation, and personally, I'm with you. Dog sniffs should in theory have nothing to do with traffic stops, because the point is something completely different - to find drugs and weapons.

The way the Court historically treats the dog sniff is unique - it's not a classic search of possessions or property, because the only thing it reveals about them is whether or not they're contraband. Officers can freely perform a dog sniff during a Terry/motor stop with no additional requirement. The dog sniff does not require probable cause or even reasonable suspicion - in fact, it is frequently used to help establish them.

Sure, we might not like it, but that's the way the law is currently read.

Now they will simply add an extra officer. As long as he conducts the search while the other officer does traffic related things, I don't see how this would prevent a dog sniff search.

That's my reading too. But before we get too mechanistic about what's going to happen: no police department can afford to put two officers and a drug dog in every traffic patrol car. Police departments will be able to adapt so that the patrols that already had drug dogs will often (but not always) be able to use them. What they won't be able to do is ensure that any stop can be converted on a whim to a drug search.

It's an incremental win, but a win.

To do that, you'd have to know in advance which officers were going to be making traffic stops in which they would want an excuse to make an otherwise unconstitutional excuse so you could preposition K9 units to assist them, or you'd have to have every patrol car have two officers and a dog. Either of these is impractical.

We should cut to the subtext here and stipulate: trained dog handling officers can cue their dogs to alert.

So the problem is, if you're on a traffic patrol and already have a drug dog (many do), then the following sequence remains blessed:

1. Make a reasonable traffic stop

2. Approach vehicle with drug dog

3. Cue dog to alert concurrent with traffic stop handling

4. Conduct car search based on cued alert

No delay has been added in this procedure, and by the letter of the opinion today, it looks like that search will hold up.

Drug dogs are basically lie detectors with fur. Just as unreliable, just as easy to misuse, and yet people still think they're doing something useful.

What happens when a large percentage of the cued alerts result in nothing found via search?

http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-01-06/news/ct-met-ca...

Evidently a Supreme Court Ruling. Hopefully there will be a ruling that drug dogs aren't considered probable cause soon.

Arguably, Jay-Z's point was that when he had 99 problems, the K-9 was not one! There's a good discussion of this in Mason's wonderful dissection of 99 Problems [1]. It's on PDF page 16, or section M. (I was actually kind of surprised at this ruling, because I thought this was pretty well settled law.)

[1] http://www.slu.edu/Documents/law/Law%20Journal/Archives/LJ56...

Nice. Mason gives a pretty good explanation of the legal differences between a K-9 officer already on the scene and the "excessive prelongation of the search" involved in calling for one.

> Dog sniffs are “sui generis,” the Court has held—they’re unique in that they don’t reveal any information about the contents of the object sniffed except the presence of contraband, as to which you have no privacy right. Thus, if the police have a dog ready to sniff your car when they pull you over for a traffic violation, you have no basis for objecting to the sniff. And, of course, if the dog does alert to the car, that is probable cause, so the police can then search the whole car. That’s what the officer wanted to do with Jay-Z, but the K-9 unit wasn’t there when he was pulled over, and was late arriving.

That's a vary dangerous line of thinking as dog's are far from 100% accurate.* How about I setup chemical sniffers in the middle of NY subway station and detain anyone that set's them off?

* Actual statistics are rather hard to come by in large part because from a cops standpoint a false positive is not that big a deal.

I was in an Amtrak station once and observed a DHS officer with a dog. While the officer was occupied talking to someone a person stood by them for a while, walked past and came back again, then walked away; all behind the officer where they wouldn't have been seen.

The officer finished with what they were doing and started to walk away and the person returned. Shortly after the person entered the line of sight of the officer the dog, who was constantly looking at the officer's face, 'triggered'-- wagging its tail and moving excitedly towards the person; whom the officer immediately detained.

When the crazy door to door dog searches case was before the supreme court, I took some time to read a bit about the subject; there is virtually no structural protection or really any review that prevents the dogs from just being a laundering mechanism for their handlers (perhaps unconscious) suggestions. Though they do have true positives to the extent their accuracy is characterized at all, they're not very reliable, and very little is done to analyze or control for false positives (and many officers that handle them seem to believe there are basically no real false positives-- that instead false triggers must be on 'residue'), though there seems to be no scientific basis for that belief. (Though there easily could be; a reasonable practice would be to log and track all triggers by each dog and the results in order to monitor their performance and establish their their level of both type-1 and type-2 errors).

Unfortunately, the courts are continuing to allow wide leeway for something that appears to be almost pseudo-science-- ascribing near magical properties to the dogs-- presumably because we like the result and it sounds reasonable; evidence be damned.

You remind me of the horse that could count.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clever_Hans#The_Clever_Hans_eff...

"The Clever Hans Effect has also been observed in drug sniffing dogs. A study at University of California Davis revealed that cues can be telegraphed by the handler to the dogs, resulting in false positives."

Hello, friend. In English, we don't use apostrophes before the final S in plural nouns, or before the final S in verbs. "Dogs" and "sets" are correct. The apostrophe represents either ownership or omitted letters, neither of which are the case here.

The thing is, most cops aren't driving around with dogs. The way I read this ruling, in the absence of probable cause, the only way for a dog sniff to legally occur is if you are pulled over by a car that happens to have 2 officers and a dog in the car. One begins the ticket writing process, while the other simultaneously runs the dog around the car. This would cause no delay in the stop, and thus wouldn't violate this ruling.

So Jay-Z only has 99 problems when he is pulled over by a K-9 patrol car with 2 cops in it. K-9 patrols are almost always clearly marked, so the moral is...drive carefully when you encounter one.

And that's a problem. Because trained drug dogs are trivially (even unconsciously) manipulated into falsifying probable cause using cues, where they are even trained in genuine detection in the first place. A complete lack of negative controls in "training" is apparently not uncommon - in which case they're not even really trying to hold up the pretense that accurate detection is the goal.

https://www.animallaw.info/article/cueing-and-probable-cause...

The actual line is

    Well we'll see how smart you are when the K9 come

Which implies the dog is not currently with the officer and he is going to detain Jay-Z until the dog gets there. So this would actually cut the number of problems Jay-Z has down to 98.

Jay-Z says he has 99 problems but a bitch "ain't" one. So regardless he'll still have 99 problems. Additionally he says this in regards to the K9 coming, so this ruling wouldn't affect him either way.

I guess it'd depend on the gender of the drug dog.

"This ruling may be a bit of a moot point, except in cases where officers don't follow the proscribed sequence of events."

The ruling explicitly disallows even a de minimus stop, for however brief the period, and not as a matter of timeliness, but as a matter of lacking cause.

Now, if a cop wants to sniff your car with a dog, they're going to have to fabricate a reason of their very own, y'know, like "I thought I smelled marijuana" or "the subject's eyes suggested intoxication".

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