Amtrak Officer Misleads Traveler About Drug Dog Behavior In Order To Perform An Illegal Search

Drug dogs are permission slips for warrantless searches. That's it. They may have been legitimate when they first became part of law enforcement work, but they've devolved into malleable props in the ongoing farce that is the the Drug War. Despite these failures, they're heralded by law enforcement as superpowered miracle workers who can do things like sniff out hidden people in moving vehicles full of other (non-hidden) people.

Dogs often alert to nothing at all, either because they're relatively terrible at sniffing out contraband or because they're responding to cues (conscious or unconscious) from their handlers. Drug dogs have also been spotted alerting enthusiastically to things they have a natural fondness for, like sausages and cheese. And, because a drug dog can be said to have done whatever a cop says it's done, they can be used to "justify" a warrantless search even when they've done nothing at all. (h/t FourthAmendment.com)

Shaun Estes, who was traveling by train from Chicago to California, was confronted by Amtrak detectives (yes, there is such a thing) while smoking a cigarette during a brief stop in Reno, Nevada. Detective Madhu Kurup approached Estes based on nothing more than the fact that Estes' one-way ticket had been purchased with a credit card belonging to someone else. Seeing this on the passenger manifest, Kurup requested the assistance of local officers and their drug dog. That's when things went from bad to worse to farcical.