Thanks to the hilarious internet miracle known as Dogshaming, we’ve all learned a valuable lesson over the past six months – Dogs can be wrong.
For little things like “Why is my underwear in 73 pieces?” or “Why is there a poop on the TV remote?” this is a cute affectation, if not slightly annoying for the dog owner. But when you remember that we, as humans, have in some cases assigned dogs roles that carry some actual modicum of responsibility, then animal error becomes a slightly more problematic proposition.
Case in point, the role dogs play in detecting drugs being carried by people in certain public places.
You’ve all seen it before. You shuffle through gates a train station or airport or music festival single file, a Police Officer with a particularly handsome hound at his side lets his four legged friend do a bit of sniffing around, eventually the dog smells something and sits, the person in question gets hauled off for inspection whilst the pooch gets a rolled up towel to chew on for a bit because who’s a good first line of defence in the futile war on drugs? YOU ARE! YISSSSSS!
But it turns out that not only are a whole mess of those identifications from drug detecting dogs wrong, but those false readings are leading to a hell of a lot of innocent people being subjected to invasive and embarrassing police searches, with some even being taken as far as being forced to strip naked and squat.
In New South Wales it’s been revealed that as many as 10,000 innocent people are being put through the wringer every year due to false positive dog readings. Of the 17,800 people searched by police following positive dog reactions, a whopping 64% subsequently found no drugs. And, more to that, of those searches that did turn up evidence of possession, a mere 2.44% eventually lead to successful prosecutions.
The brow furrowing statistics don’t end there. It turns out that getting searched has a lot to do with where you are as well. There’s strong evidence to suggest that you’re about 6.5 times more likely to get searched if you’re at Redfern Station than you are at Central or Kings Cross.
And it’s this weight of numbers that’s contributing to a rise in an even more alarming statistic – naked police searches have risen by around 32% in NSW over the past five years. That is, Police have subjected people – a good number of them eventually being found to be innocent – to full strip searches that include squatting to prove the absence of any internal drug concealment. This, despite the NSW Police Code of Conduct stating that searches in this form should only occur if “the seriousness and urgency of the situation” require them.
There are serious health concerns arising from the practice of using drug detection dogs as well, with fears that the panic induced by their presence – particularly at music festivals – causes people to consume all their drugs at once for fear of getting caught, leading to accidental overdoses and increased amounts of people in need of medical attention.
Recent studies have shown that as much as 50% of people in their 20s, and 60% in their 30s, have used illicit drugs in the past.
NSW Police maintain that drug detection dogs, combined with officer’s observations, provide more than ample probable cause for searches to be conducted on members of the public.
Photo: Justin Tallis via Getty Images.
via SMH.
