Class action from more than 3,000 group members argues vast majority of strip-searches at music festivals between 2018 and 2022 were unlawful
The New South Wales police force knew drug detection dogs only have a “30% hit-rate” but continued to use them as the primary justification to strip-search people at music festivals, a court has heard.
The revelation came amid closing arguments for a class action in the NSW supreme court, where lawyers for the plaintiffs have argued the vast majority of strip-searches conducted by state police between 2018 and 2022 at music festivals were unlawful.
The class action was brought by Slater and Gordon Lawyers and the Redfern Legal Centre against the state of NSW over allegedly unlawful strip-searches conducted by police, including of children.
These dogs could absolutely be much better, but the police prefer to have half trained dogs so they can justify using them as a pretext to harass people.
Sort of. They would be liable to alert on people who HAD consumed drugs earlier or had been around people that had consumed drugs. Furthermore it has been shown in a scientific study that dogs alert in part based on their owners suspicion even when not deliberately signaled to do so and since such suspicion is liable to fall on minorities just serves to justify the dogs masters pre-existing judgement.
You’re correct that the police like having the dogs as a pretext to search on flimsy/non-existent evidence, but it’s not that the dogs are half-trained; they are very well trained to give false positives based on the officers’ body language and attitude.