In an attempt to find legislation to write since our queue is empty, I found this bill passed in the Northeast over 6 years ago:
https://talkelections.org/FORUM/index.php?topic=190517.0Introduced by Dallasfan, his argument well summarizes the merits of this bill so I will quote it here:
Firstly, we've liberalized our laws on narcotics quite a bit in Atlasia. However, undoubtedly there's still prosecution for those who do so illegally (much in the way that moonshining is still illegal in the United States.) Naturally, it would go to follow that law enforcement officers probably use "drug dogs" as they do in real life.
What's wrong with this?
Drug dogs are just as apt to be wrong as they are right. For instance:
Quote from: NPR
The through three years worth of cases in which law enforcement used dogs to sniff out drugs in cars in suburban Chicago. According to the analysis, officers found drugs or paraphernalia in only 44 percent of cases in which the dogs had alerted them.
When the driver was Latino, the dogs were right just just 27 percent of the time.
link
There's obviously a degree of racial profiling and profiling in general. And despite the obvious fallibility of these canine inspectors, an alert by these dogs is considered "probable cause" to be searched, as the United States Supreme Court ruled in Illinois vs Caballes. Secondly, what qualifies as an alert? Pretty much whatever the police officer feels like.
Quote from: reason.com
So the deputy was free to walk his dog around Burns’ truck. “He got out with this dog and went around the car, two or three times,” Burns says. “He came back and said the dog had ‘passively alerted’ on my vehicle.” Burns, who is familiar with drug-detecting dogs from his work as an M.P. at Edwards Air Force Base in the 1970s, was puzzled. Properly trained police dogs are supposed to indicate the presence of drugs with a clear, objectively verifiable signal, such as sitting down in front of an odor’s source or scratching at it. Yet “the dog never sat down, the dog never scratched, the dog never did anything that would indicate to me that it thought there was something in there.
To me, this is an obvious violation of civil liberties, and gives officers more leeway for warrantless searches.
Another reason why we ought to pass this, is that narcotics-detection dogs can be expensive. So, I think if we outlaw our law enforcement agencies from using these dogs, they can devote more of their financial resources to things that actually stop crime.
Now, amendments were made to the bill that allow for exceptions that I think is most important to note -
these dogs can still be used if they are handled by people properly trained to handle them, as they can be highly effective in those situations. Additionally, police dogs can still be used in all other cases. I yield to any questions or amendments.
