Los Angeles Sexual Assault Lawyer Blog

The reliability of police K-9 units is questionable, at best.

While our Los Angeles Sexual Assault Lawyers don't deny that a great deal of time and energy goes into training these animals, the question of how many times they get it wrong - allowing police to conduct a search under false pretenses - looms large.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department uses K-9s for a variety of different law enforcement functions, as CBS Los Angeles recently reported.

A recent U.S. Supreme Court decision in Florida v. Harris held that a police dog's affirmation of a suspicious substance, used in conjunction with other evidence, is sufficient enough to warrant a search.

This decision is particularly troubling to us from the standpoint of defending clients accused of drug-related crimes. As former San Francisco Police Commissioner Peter Kean wrote in s2011 editorial, police officers lying on the stand with regard to illegal drug searches is ridiculously common. He called it a "not-so-secret secret" that undercover narcotics units blatantly and intentionally lie under oath and no one seems interested in stopping them.

This backing of the K-9 units' supposed infallibility is extremely troubling. Defendants typically aren't going to know enough about K-9 training to say whether an indicator given by a dog is positive. But even if the dog gives a positive indication that later turns out to be wrong, it won't matter in terms of what was uncovered in the search, so long as the officer can show that he used the "totality of evidence" in determining whether there was probable cause.

At issue here was whether police agencies had a responsibility to track a K-9 unit's in-the-field hits or misses. The court has found they don't.

Here, a defendant was pulled over on a routine stop. He refused to let the officer search his car. The officer brought out a K-9 unit, which alerted in the affirmative. The officer searched. He didn't find anything the dog was trained to locate, but he did find items typically used in the manufacture of methamphetamine. The defendant was arrested. Booked. Released.

A few days later, he was stopped by the same officer, same K-9 unit. The dog again alerted positive to drugs and again the car was searched. However this time, the officer found nothing.

The defendant sought to show that the dog's false positive record was poor. However, he couldn't do that because the agency didn't keep records of the dog's performance. And now, it's been confirmed that such records are not required.

But that doesn't mean your case is a lost cause, especially in cases where there was no other reason for the officer to suspect you of wrongdoing.