I think a lot of the time the drug dogs are reading cues (conscious or subconscious) from the officers handling them, especially in the cases where the police do a semi-random stop and call for the K-9 unit because they suspect there are drugs there. In Texas there has been a lot of controversy about how the police handle roadside searches. On roads with high drug traffic they will always ask for permission to search your vehicle when they stop you for whatever reason, and if you refuse they will make you wait until they can call out the drug dogs, who will ALWAYS alert (according to the police, at least) which will lead to a thorough search of the vehicle. The controversy is that technically the police aren’t allowed to hold you there while they call in the dogs just because you refuse to let them search, but they have been doing it that way for years.
I have never heard of a case, first, second, or third-hand where dogs were used after someone refused to allow a search of their car and the police allowed them to leave without further searching because the dogs didn’t react. In this particular application of drug dogs I think their sole purpose is to provide probable cause to search a person the officer is suspicious of when there is no other reason to search.
This just burns me up. Its ridiculous how various “high-tech” forms of search have long been discluded from the laws that protect you from a search unless a probable cause exists. A perfect example is infrared scanning of houses; they’ll fly over a neighborhood, take shots with an infrared camera (or whatever it is), and if they notice a lot of light eminating from a particular house, THEN its considered probable cause for a search warrant. Why? Because the house in question MIGHT be growing marijuana. Fortunately, somebody finally got their heads out of their asses and realized this was an invasive search conducted without a warrant, so it was recently banned. Using a drug dog when NO probable cause exists IN ORDER TO OBTAIN probable cause is unconstitutional. Why is it done? Because people haven’t raised enough hell about it. This isn’t even including the various legal issues that are involved by forcing the “suspects” to wait at the scene while the police find a drug dog; you aren’t under arrest, yet you are being detained against your will, with no probable cause whatsoever.
Man Badz, screw that. If I’m ever pulled over in Texas, when they ask to search I’ll deny their request, and ask if I’m being arrested. If they say no, bam, I’m out. They got no reason to sniff’n’search for just being pulled over! Sheesh!
In theory, that would work. In reality…a lot of the highway patrol guys don’t take kindly to being told what they can and cannot do. I suspect that if you went that route they would suddenly notice some other reason to hold you - one time a police officer (city in this case) claimed to have found a seed in the simple search they are allowed to do with no probable cause (shinging a flashlight around in the car, supposedly to look for weapons, without moving anything) and then proceeded to do the thorough search. The ‘seed’ was a ball of dry mud about half again as big as the largest marijuana seed I have ever seen, and if it WAS a seed, they could have busted me for possession on that alone, but they knew it wasn’t really a pot seed and let me go after ransacking my vehicle.
Oh man how I’d love to twist their balls off in a court case if that happened to me.
Cops are a necessary evil employed to serve and protect the citizenry. Often the police forces forget that they are employed and empowered by the citizens and attempt to exert controls and powers not granted to them by the citizenry. This is when we twist their balls until they fall off like so many castrated rams.
Oh yeah, I just wanted to say that when I was young and stupid, when I was pulled over in front of my house I consented to a vehicle search for which the officer had absolutely zero probable cause. He wanted to flex his shit for a ride-along passenger of his. Boy, how I wish I had known then what I know now.