Originally published at: Texas man illegally detained and truck ransacked by cops: video exposes rights violations | Boing Boing
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good luck on the lawsuit. you’re gonna need it.
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required viewing for every American:
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honestly the most shocking part about this, given that we’re talking about texas here, is that they did this to a white guy.
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corrupt or just really, really bad at his job…
imagine how many times he’s used these same tactics and gotten away with it. these flagrant violations are natural to him, like he has done it this way a thousand times.
i personally would try to thoroughly investigate this deputy. he was drug seeking. his actions make me believe he has a habit.
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I am going to posit the MAIN REASON for these kinds of stops…
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Another video pertinent to this specific case:
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Ah yes, the drug sniffing dog. Nature’s perfect probable cause generator. In a just world those would not exist except as couch companions for someone who will love them because obviously they are very good dogs.
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And often taken from “suspected” criminals under civil asset forfeiture laws. 
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Until we can cross examine a dog in court (as afforded by the 6th amendment) then the use of K-9 evidence should not be allowed. Clearly the police have figured out how to game the use of dogs, it’s like getting an immediate search warrant minus a judge.
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It’s so frustrating to me that the courts have taken up this issue, and bafflingly came to the conclusion that drug dogs alerting on a vehicle are sufficient to provide probable cause for a warrantless search. Their reasoning was based on studies that show dogs can pretty accurately detect drugs…in a controlled testing environment. Where there’s no cop in the vicinity giving subtle signals to the dog. And I believe those studies. I know there are dogs who can reliably detect all kinds of chemicals from illicit drugs to explosives. Hell, there’s dogs that can smell cancer and detect when someone is about to have a seizure. Dogs are amazing. But they’re also trained by rewarding them with treats and praise when they do what their handler wants them to do, and they can detect really subtle non-verbal cues to determine what their handler wants. And in the case of these drug sniffing dogs, their handlers want them to alert. I do not understand how this hasn’t been demonstrated in court yet.
Regardless, though, in this case, it’s actually irrelevant that the dog alerted on the vehicle. The dog should never have been brought in. The officer did not have reasonable suspicion for the stop to begin with. If this guy’s legal team is good, I actually think he has a decent chance of winning this. This is pretty blatant and egregious.
Also, I just want to echo what @knoxblox said. This cop was hoping to find cash. That’s all he was after. He was hoping this guy was a contractor or someone else running a business where they might carry a lot of cash on occasion. Once they take that money, it’s incredibly hard to ever get it back, even if you win a lawsuit over the legality of the stop. Civil asset forfeiture needs to be held to be unconstitutional. Period. Or Congress needs to ban it. Several states have already. It always leads to corruption.
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That’s why I always carry a few bricks of bacon-scented fake $100s in my car’s console: the dog perks up, the cop confiscates my “cash” and lets me go, and I just reorder some more bricks on Amazon.
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This is the most important point. They are not trained to detect these things, they already can do that. They are trained to make their handlers happy. In whatever way they can.
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I bet the false-positive rate is about 90%. Inquiring about the error rate might be a good trial strategy.
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I’m sorry, but this is a remarkably bad idea. The cop could bust you for counterfeiting, and that’s a much bigger nightmare.
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Busted for a prop? After winning that suit, you could afford to use real $100 bundles.
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In fact the entire science of drug/bomb/whatever sniffing dogs is hugely suspect, even if police weren’t abusing them (which they absolutely are). Sniffer dogs of all types routinely fail properly blinded tests, and it’s highly likely the entire field is the Clever Hans effect.
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I’ve had the same experience in Arkansas, the cop said I was “skirting the fog line” and I didn’t know what he was talking about.
90 minutes they detained me, I’m not dumb enough to complain.
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… except that it’s evidence that dogs falsely alert
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Well that might be helpful data for future arguments against the use of drug sniffing dogs in general, but it’s irrelevant for this case because the stop violated the man’s 4th Amendment rights well before the dog was brought in. The sheriff’s deputy needed some reasonable suspicion to initiate the stop in the first place, and I have no idea what that could possibly be here. The drifting in the lane is clearly disproved by the dashcam video, and the deputy’s later remarks make it clear that was just pretext anyway. Since he was trying to claim he had reasonable suspicion that the driver had drugs or other contraband in the car, he has to have some basis for that, and what is that here? It can’t be the dog’s alerting, because he needs that reasonable suspicion before the dog is even called in. So what is it? The type of truck? That’s not sufficient. There were no moving violations. It will be interesting to see what argument the sheriff’s department uses here as the justification for the stop. Even if it were a moving violation or drifting out of the lane, that then puts you in the area where you can ask the driver questions, and ask him to step out of the car (i.e. it’s a Terry stop), but if you can’t locate some probable cause in the normal amount of time it takes to deal with the original issue of the stop (drifting out of the lane) you have to let the guy go. In other words, the officer can ask questions in the time it takes to run the guy’s license and issue the warning or citation. He cannot call in the drug dog just on a hunch. That’s why it’s irrelevant to this case that the dog alerted when there was nothing in the truck. This stop was problematic well before that.
The more I think about this, the more I think that sheriff’s department is going to try to settle this now. I really don’t see a way they win this if it goes to court, and in Bexar County, surely the sheriff’s department has counsel knowledgable enough to know this. They were hoping this guy wouldn’t sue. Now that he has, my guess is they will try to settle.
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