Simsbury High School in Hartford, CT is joining a troubling growing trend: Employing cops with drug dogs to routinely patrol the halls, conducting random searches for drugs. What other schools have recently added random drug dog searches?
http://liarcatchers.com/drugdogsweeps.html
To name just a few
•Circleville and Westfall High Schools in Ohio
•Kirksville High School in Missouri
•Patterson Mill Middle/High School in Baltimore
•Pleasonton School District in California. It’s under consideration for Fremont High School.
A federal judge in Missouri last month upheld drug dog searches at Springfield schools.
Some parents in Sag Harbor (Long Island) are protesting.
Do we want our middle and high school building to mimic a prison?” parent Marianna Levine asked school board members at a regularly scheduled meeting on Monday….She argues that bringing in a police K-9 unit would essentially create a dynamic similar to a “totalitarian state” where students are stripped of their rights.
Why aren’t all parents protesting? No wonder people think education is going to the dogs.
Drug dogs have been increasingly shown to be fallible. What happens when a search following an “alert” on a locker turns up nothing? Police can say there must have been drugs in the locker at one time, and that’s what the dogs are smelling. But if sniffing dogs can’t tell the difference between the odor of drugs presently in a locker and the odor of drugs that were once in a locker, how does an “alert” make it probable that drugs are presently in the locker? Or maybe they just say, “Bad dog!”
The police should spend their time (and our tax money) investigating real crimes, not ambiguous odors.
