I'm not one of those "fuck the police" types by any stretch of the imagination, but something just dawned on me that I can't believe I hadn't considered before. The wife is watching Live PD (while I'd rather be watching anything else) and the cops pull over this SUV, and they thought there might be drugs in it, though I missed what ever it was that made them think that. So they called the K-9 out there, and it starts sniffing around, and it signals that it smelled something by sitting down...so then the cops started searching the car. The dog just sat. So to be clear...no probable cause + a dog sits = probable cause. You can train a dog to sit any number of ways. My sister in law has two deaf dogs that are trained to sit by visual cues. So a cop could theoretically tell the dog to sit, and then he'd have probable cause to search the vehicle. Am I missing something?
probably not... it's only been in recent years that a cop claiming to have smelled something "funny" himself was finally considered insufficient cause.
No, you're not. Studies have shown that even highly trained dogs, like police dogs, want little more than to please their handlers, and if giving someone an excuse to search a car is enough to get their handler excited, then the dogs will do that. But, and this is key, "probable cause" laws are so vaguely worded that just about anything is enough justification for a cop to search your car. Waaaaay back in the late '80s, I had someone tell me that it was common practice for the highway patrol outside of Memphis to pull over anyone with out of state tags who were driving 1 MPH over the speed limit and search their car for drugs. Sounded like bullshit to me, then, a few years later, I was watching COPS when they were covering Memphis, and what did I see? Them pulling over someone with out of state tags driving 1 MPH over the speed limit. Sure enough, they found drugs on the guy (dude had fucking 55-gallon trash bags with weed in his trunk, not to mention his personal stash of a few grams of coke in the console) and took him to jail. Ten years later, I've got a job in a town on the border between TN and KY. What do I notice when Bonnaroo's happening? The cops are pulling over all kinds of cars on their way into the state and searching them. Strangely, I didn't see the same thing when the big country music festival was happening a week or so later. Almost as if folks didn't think that "good ol' boys" liked weed. Shit's fucking bullshit and the sooner we decriminalize all drugs, the better off we'll all be.
I kinda get the Memphis thing. I-40 is a major drug corridor. When I lived there, there were white SUVs with blacked out windows parked at every other overpass.
It was a drug corridor for the stupid folks. The smart ones no doubt figured that there was a heavy police presence in the area and found different routes. At least the guys I knew who ran drugs did.
I got pulled over in TN for speeding and it was a drug check. Of course, I was going 90 in a 70. Tjhe cop must have said dude about every other word when he was talking to me. I told him the panties in the trunk were mine and he did not spend much time poking around. I got away with a warning because it was obviously a drug search and not a traffic stop.
