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Zero probability is unreasonable
(by Dave Lange - May 16, 2012)
COUNTY LINE, BY DAVE LANGE
Zero probability is unreasonable
Today's review, Chagrin Falls High School students, is about probability and reasonableness. Your teachers may have taught you the meanings of such words in the lower grades, but school administrators now want you to forget about that.
I like dogs, and I know they're pretty smart. The ones that have been my best friends knew it was probable that I'd feed them every day, but they didn't consider it reasonable for me to constrain them on leashes for our walks in the park.
You students are pretty smart too. So you've probably figured out that I'm speaking of the legal term "probable cause," which refers to the reasonable belief that a crime has been committed, and the Fourth Amendment protection from "unreasonable searches and seizures," which occurred recently in your school parking lots.
As you know, Chagrin Falls police officers and Cuyahoga County sheriff's deputies, along with three drug-sniffing dogs, snooped around your vehicles for certain scents. Subsequently, based on certain alerts from the four-legged sniffers, eight of your vehicles were subjected to intrusive searches by the authorities. Nothing illegal was found. A similar sweep of the school parking lots last year found three cans of beer, a tiny trace of marijuana and some chewing tobacco. What a haul!
An analysis conducted by the Chicago Tribune last year found that drug alerts by drug-sniffing dogs led to actual drugs just 44 percent of the time. A 2006 report in New South Wales, Australia, found that drug-detection dogs detected real drugs just 26 percent of the time, and 84 percent of those were small amounts of marijuana.
And now, drug dogs searching local parking lots have been proven accurate zero percent of the time. That's right, students, probability, as in "probable cause," means less than half the time in Chicago suburbs, about a quarter of the time in Australia and absolutely nothing at all in Chagrin Falls, Ohio.
But that's not unreasonable, according to Chagrin Falls police, who insisted that these highly trained dogs are infallible and that somebody must have had drugs in those cars sometime, somewhere. So be careful, students, it just might have been your grandmother with Oxycontin in her purse when you drove her to the pharmacy. Maybe that valet wearing a hoodie took a quick toke when he parked your car last month. Who knows what powdery residue could have fallen from that woman's oily hair at the carwash?
A study done at the University of California-Davis and reported in the January 2011 issue of the journal Animal Cognition revealed that detection-dog teams identified nonexistent drug scents more than 200 times. The false alerts occurred much more often in rooms with decoys for the human handlers than in rooms with decoys for the dogs. The canines are so smart that they pick up cognitive signals from their suspicious partners, who aren't smart enough to realize it.
Now, students, you know how unreasonable it is to subject your property to such random and unreliable searches. Unfortunately, you also know that the people who should teach you about the Constitution and the ones who are supposed to protect your constitutional rights just don't care.
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