Keep festivals free of sniffer dog troubles

Greg Barns

With the Australian summer come music festivals like the national Big Day Out concerts which finished up in Perth on Sunday.

And with these music festivals come the police and their sniffer dogs, looking for cannabis, party drugs and any other so called 'illicit' substance which festival patrons might have in their pockets or bags. But is this anti-drugs tool a waste of time, resources and money?

Yes is the answer. Because a sniffer dog's capacity to detect drugs is poor and their presence at music festivals has little or no deterrent effect.

This summer police around Australia have used sniffer dogs to arrest and charge around 100 people with possessing drugs.

The chances are that many of those people alleged by police to have used or possessed drugs at music festivals over the past few months have been wrongly accused. This is because sniffer dogs get it wrong. Late last year the New South Wales Greens MP David Shoebridge released figures from that state's police which showed that in a staggering 80 per cent of cases sniffer dogs came up with a false positive - that is, they thought they sniffed drugs but didn't.

As the ABC's Amy Simmons reported on December 12 last year, Shoebridge's figures show that "New South Wales police officers have carried out 14,102 searches on people as a result of a sniffer dog indicating the presence of an illegal drug. Of those searches, illicit substances were not found on 11,248 occasions - which means four out of five times the dogs are getting it wrong."

Disturbingly, the response of the New South Wales Parliamentary Secretary for Police Geoff Provest was effectively, who cares if four out of five people are innocent.

"Sure there is an element of error but it also creates an element of fear in people with drugs," Provest said.

Well actually Mr Provest it does not create an element of fear. Research carried out by Matthew Dunn and Louisa Degenhardt in 2009 found that "regular ecstasy users do not see detection dogs as an obstacle to their drug use". Monica Barratt, a Melbourne-based researcher in this field notes that patrons of music festivals and clubs have learnt to avoid sniffer dogs by, for example, "storing their drugs internally in the canisters wrapped in condoms".

It is also the case that sniffer dogs' capacity to accurately search for drugs is undermined by their handlers' behaviour. Research conducted by the Department of Neurology at the University of California at Davis, and published early last year, shows that a sniffer dog's accuracy in detecting drugs is undermined by their handler's behaviour. The dogs pick up unconscious cues of their handlers such as when a police officer stares at a particular person, or leads a dog to a particular location, or encourages dogs to display unusual interest in a specific location. In the experiments carried out by the researchers dogs raised 225 alerts, all of them false. As The Economist wryly noted in a report about the study, to "mix metaphors, the dogs were crying 'wolf' at the unconscious behest of their handlers".

The real evil of the use of police sniffer dogs is that they allow for the search of an innocent individual and his possessions, including his house. If a dog wrongly alerts the presence of drugs then the police can frisk, strip search, cavity search and turn a car or house upside down. The Chicago Tribune unmasked this disturbing breach of human rights in a 2011 study which found that police dogs falsely alerted the presence of drugs in 56 per cent of cases that the Tribune examined from three police departments in Chicago. That means, there are large numbers of innocent people who have been subjected to the trauma of a police search.

The message from all this is that music festival goers around Australia will have their rights infringed because police stubbornly refuse to heed the evidence and stop tramping around festivals with their notoriously inaccurate detection tool, the sniffer dog. Why do governments allow this to happen? Surely the millions of dollars that such operations cost could be better used in crime prevention activities that actually produce results.

But the sniffer dogs fiasco is just another example of the moral and policy bankruptcy of the war on drugs. We as a society will do anything, including using false accusations, because we have an obsession with cannabis and party drugs. How about we allow the sale of these drugs to festival patrons through a properly regulated, quality controlled market which the state can tax? Then the sniffer dogs could go and do something useful.