Lex is a drug-sniffing police dog. His owner trained Lex by giving him a treat every time he alerted, whether or not Lex was right. Is that a good way to train drug-sniffing dogs? Maybe not for innocent people who get stripped searched when they are falsely identified as drug carriers, but it's great for police departments that use the dogs to enrich themselves with civil asset forfeitures.
Radley Balko of the Washington Post writes about how Federal Courts are making matters ever worse.
The problem here is that invasive searches based on no more than a government official's hunch is precisely what the Fourth Amendment is supposed to guard against. Unfortunately, the way the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled on this issue not only doesn't account for the problem, but also has given police agencies a strong incentive to ensure that drug dogs aren't trained to act independently of their handler's suspicions. A dog prone to false alerts means more searches, which means more opportunities to find and seize cash and other lucre under asset forfeiture policies. In fact, a drug dog's alert in and of itself is often cited as evidence of drug activity, even if no drugs are found, thus enabling police to seize cash, cars and other property from motorists. For example, I've interviewed dog trainers who have told me that drug dogs can be trained to alert only when there are measurable quantities of a drug — to ignore so-called "trace" or "remnant" alerts that aren't cause for arrest. But these trainers say that police agencies don't want dogs trained to ignore remnant odors, because any alert is an authorization for a more thorough search.
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