The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit issued a troubling ruling about drug dogs last week. U.S. v. Bentley is just the latest in a series of rulings in which the federal courts refuse to consider the possibility that police departments may be manipulating the dogs to authorize unlawful searches — or at the very least that police agencies aren’t ensuring that the dogs are being trained to minimize the possibility, even though that would be easy to do.

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The problem with drug-sniffing dogs is not that dogs aren’t capable of sniffing out drugs; it’s that we’ve bred into domestic dogs a trait that trumps that ability — a desire to read us and to please us. If a drug dog isn’t specifically trained to compensate for this, it will merely read its handler’s body language and confirm its handler’s suspicions about who is and isn’t hiding drugs.

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A dog prone to false alerts means more searches, which means more opportunities to find and seize cash and other lucre under asset forfeiture policies. In fact, a drug dog’s alert in and of itself is often cited as evidence of drug activity, even if no drugs are found, thus enabling police to seize cash, cars and other property from motorists.

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It turns out that Lex’s [Lex is the dog in the court case.] handler gives the dog a reward every time he alerts, regardless of whether that alert is accurate. Lex isn’t getting rewarded for filtering innocent motorists from guilty ones. He’s being trained to authorize a search, each and every time he’s called to duty.