Drug-sniffing dogs in traffic stops often wrong

Chicago Tribune

January 06, 2011|By Dan Hinkel and Joe Mahr, Tribune reporters

Drug-sniffing dogs can give police probable cause to root through cars by the roadside, but state data show the dogs have been wrong more often than they have been right about whether vehicles contain drugs or paraphernalia.

The dogs are trained to dig or sit when they smell drugs, which triggers automobile searches. But a Tribune analysis of three years of data for suburban departments found that only 44 percent of those alerts by the dogs led to the discovery of drugs or paraphernalia.

For Hispanic drivers, the success rate was just 27 percent.

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pandagon.net 

" I'm saying that drug dogs should be permanently banned. Even if they worked, they're basically a cheap attempt by law enforcement to skirt constitutional protections, but since they don't even work, they're nothing but a magic trick used to distract from what's really going on: cops conducting illegal searches based on their own prejudices."

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Confirmation bias in  the form of the "Clever Hans" phenomena, plus more than little racial bigotry equals an all out assault on the Forth Amendment.  This is you government on drugs.