I read with interest this commentary in the Guardian about a lawsuit which challenges the use of so-called ‘sniffer dogs’ to determine who will be searched for drugs. Some of the quoted statistics are eye-opening:
Australian research has found that in 74% of searches following an indication by a police dog no drugs were found. … During Operation Shelter, conducted by the British Transport Police during Latitude festival in Ipswich in 2008, only 12% of searches conducted as a result of “tells” by police dogs located illegal drugs.
However, police maintain that an agitated dog is reasonable enough suspicision that a person can be detained and fully searched. Sounds like they have a pretty low standard for “reasonable.” By those statistics, police dogs are proven wrong three to seven times as often as they are proven right.
Would you undergo surgery if there was an 88% chance that you didn’t need to?
As the column further points out, shouldn’t “the manner in which the police uphold the law must be proportional to the offence committed”?
The author of the comment piece is associated with Release, which is a UK drug-and-human-rights organization proceeding with the legal challenge.
(Image from Flickr user redjar)
Grant Hamilton
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