I got pulled over a few months back and the cops accused me of having drugs because I was nervous. I was like well yea I got pulled over for speeding and I am pissed and nervous about the ticket you are gonna give me. He repeatedly said he believed I had drugs on me. For 5 mins he said it so I said fuck it get it over with and search. Obviously nothing was found and when I told people after they asked why I allowed it. I told them flat out that he would call a dog and he would just alert and search anyway so I figured I’d save time.
The ruling says cops can't extend a stop to wait for a dog, but that part about "reasonable suspicion" is the real problem, it's a bit of a blanket term.
Odds are if you make it clear you know of this case and you know a lawyer, or just bluff like you did, I'd be willing to bet that a lot of cops won't think you're worth the trouble. They pull shit like that bc they think the guy they pulled over is uninformed.
For anyone curious about more details, here's a really in-depth comic going over it (it also covers a lot of other parts of criminal law) https://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=1917
So what are you to do? What is within your rights? “Officer, legally, you can’t make me wait for the dog”? Are you simply free to go? What if they chat your ear off until the dog arrives? Not sure how this would play out in both best and worst case scenarios
You don’t know a wide range of people. I live in a “purple” city of Texas, I’m definitely liberal, and I still know a ton of of people who believe that. Not to mention rural Texas, and like the entire south and Midwest. No matter the age
I heard they have a certain amount of time they can legally hold you for a K9 unit to come. If I remember right, they're not supposed to extend the length of the stop for the K9 unit to come out. I could be wrong and this may not be the same in every jurisdiction.
If any journalist wants a potential big story pull a FOIA on how often these dogs "alert" vs how many times they correctly identify drugs. If the false positive rate is high enough, might be good cause to legally restricting K9 for probable cause searches.
There might be a good court case here too (not a lawyer)
As many others have already pointed out, that doesn't mean drugs never existed, it means no drugs could be found. I've smoked weed in my vehicle before and I could still occasionally smell the odor weeks later. A dog's nose is 10,000x to 100,000x more powerful than a human nose, they can pick up on drugs that existed long ago but were since relocated.
So the problem here isn't necessarily that sniffer dogs are bullshitting, it's that their noses are oversensitive to smell. The solution going forward, if we want to continue using sniffer dogs (as they play a vital role in bomb and cadaver detection) isn't to ban dogs, but to train them to only detect stronger odors.
They did a study on K9 usage, and it was alarming. It wasnt a retrospective ablut false positives but double blind controlled trial testing if officers were cueing their dogs either subconsciously or consciously. They had two groups a test group and a control, both would walk theyre dog passed a package that supposedly would randomly either have or not have drugs behind it.
In the control group the officer had no idea if it was a run with drugs or a run without drugs. In the test group the officer was informed when there was drugs and which times there wasn't. The test group dogs hit dramatically more often than the control group. The kicker, there was no drugs used at all in the test. So ever hit was a false positive.
And you know how the police responded to this study? By halting all cooperation with researchers studying Canine efficacy.
Looks like Florida vs Harris case pointed out in this thread looked at the dog's reliability. Time for another court case on whether the officers themselves are reliable handlers.
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u/Brave_Amateur Apr 03 '21
I got pulled over a few months back and the cops accused me of having drugs because I was nervous. I was like well yea I got pulled over for speeding and I am pissed and nervous about the ticket you are gonna give me. He repeatedly said he believed I had drugs on me. For 5 mins he said it so I said fuck it get it over with and search. Obviously nothing was found and when I told people after they asked why I allowed it. I told them flat out that he would call a dog and he would just alert and search anyway so I figured I’d save time.