Can you arrest airport passenger after drug K9 alerts on their luggage?

20/01/2022 5 min Temporada 1 Episodio 3
Can you arrest airport passenger after drug K9 alerts on their luggage?

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Episode Synopsis

The following is a computer-generated transcription, some grammar and spelling errors may be inherentHow're you doing? Guys? It's Anthony here with blue to gold law enforcement training, just left another great phenomenal class teaching officers search and seizure in Galveston, Texas, beautiful place. And one of the students asked the question, I think it's worth asking here, and we can take some teaching points from it. So the question is, is, if an airport officer runs a K9 dog on a drug canine on a piece of luggage, and alerts, can we then sit back and wait for the owner to pick up that luggage and then arrest the owner and then actually search the case, incident to arrest?And the answer is yes. But let's walk through the analysis here. So whenever we do a search, we search or seizure a protected item. We need crew, meaning crew, we need consent, or recognize exception or a warm, alright. And whether or not we need crew is based off the phone analysis. The first question courts are going to ask is whether or not the search or seizure even involves a protected area? Well, that's going to be easy here, a suitcase is a container, it is in effect, and in effects are protected under the Fourth Amendment. Persons houses, papers, and effects. So yes, the answer is we are dealing with a protected item protected by the Fourth Amendment. Is the is the free air dog sniff a search? The question the answer is no. Now in these circumstances, the officer had lawful access to the item and just a free air sniff around a piece of luggage is not going to implicate the Fourth Amendment. So the suitcase is a protected item, the dog search is not a search under the Fourth Amendment. So that's not an issue. The second thing is whether or not the arrest would offend the Fourth Amendment. So obviously a person is protected by the Fourth Amendment. And they would be seized that they were arrested. So we need an exemption to the war requirement. Well, officers an exemption to the war requirements anytime officers have probable cause that a person has committed a crime. And the officer has lawful access to the person. Well, we know when a person's in the airport, they have lawful access. If they have probable cause that the person committed a crime, they can go quickly collect habeas Gravis with the handcuffs and arrest that person. So the final piece of this is that we have no search in the fourth member with the dog; we do have a fourth amendment seizure the person if we make the arrest. And the final piece is whether or not the dog alert on the luggage is itself enough for proper cause arrest. It is right because you're going to be able to articulate that a person picking up their luggage, right? They probably even have a tag with their with their ticket number on it. They're picking up their luggage, they're the ones they're the one that gave it to the airline to transport when they're picking up their luggage. Is there a fair probability? Right probable cause? Is there a fair probability that this person knows that there are drugs? In their suitcase? The answer is yes. Right? Yes, it's fair, it's, it's fairly probable that if you pick up a piece of luggage, and there's a dog alert on that luggage, then then then there's probable cause to arrest. And if you didn't have to arrest the person, you searched the luggage that's going to be searched incident to a lawful arrest. Now, the other question that came up in this class is, could you search the luggage without the arrest? And this is, again, we're talking about drug talk. And the answer is? No. The reason is, is that there is no exception to the war requirement. There's no recognized exception number. We need crew, and we don't have consent. We don't have a war. So is there recognize exceptions open up a container?....