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Citizenship lesson goes to dogs
(by Dave Lange - April 28, 2011)
COUNTY LINE, BY DAVE LANGE
Citizenship lesson goes to dogs
The Chagrin Falls School District has joined many others with its recent decision to implement random sweeps of the high school hallways and parking lot with drug-sniffing dogs.
When authorities take such action, invariably they say it's for deterrence, prevention and awareness. It's not about spying on kids and punishing them for making bad choices, they said. But of course it is.
In justifying the drug sweeps with canine sniffers, school officials pointed out that they have meted out five marijuana-related suspensions this year alone. When did school suspensions stop being considered punishment?
Let's get something straight. Recreational drug use is not good, certainly not for children. The public schools have taken on a lot of responsibilities beyond academics, including anti-drug education.
This country has gone mighty crazy over drugs, including billions of dollars spent around the world in futile eradication programs, billions more for domestic interdiction, Draconian laws to punish pot smokers, as well as crack pushers, and the biggest prison population on Earth. So police with German shepherds parading through schools and parking lots to sniff students' lockers and cars must be expected.
American courts have made it clear that the Fourth Amendment right for citizens "to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures" does not extend to their automobiles, lockers or book bags. If you step into a public school or park your car in its lot, according to modern constitutional circumlocution, searches and seizures by the government become routine -- reasonable or not.
After all, if marijuana is the enemy of state, then a police state is far from unthinkable to the authorities, including school principals, police chiefs, prosecutors, judges and prison wardens.
No doubt, well-trained dogs are pretty darned good at sniffing out the evil weed, which happens to be awful smelly stuff. And we're told that they can find other drugs as well, including heroin, cocaine and ecstasy, although I'm sure whether they can pick Oxycontin from aspirin.
So when a drug-sniffing dog detects something in a vehicle -- even if it takes 45 minutes for a suspicious patrolman to get one to the scene of a highway traffic stop -- "probable cause," the legal term that turns unreasonable into reasonable, opens the door to police searches. Similarly, school officials can compel students to open up their lockers and their cars.
Early this year, the Chicago Tribune published an analysis of sniff-induced vehicle searches and found that the dogs' noses led to drugs or paraphernalia only 44 percent of the time. So "probable cause" in drug-sniffing cases actually is improbable. The authorities make the improbable claim that the other 56 percent of those vehicles must have had drugs in them at some time in the past, but the dogs aren't saying, and they have not been compelled to testify in court.
Today's citizenship lesson for students is that drugs are bad, searches and seizures are the American way, punishment is good and the Constitution is negotiable.
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