Greens Push To Ban Festival Drug Dogs

Australia’s Greens Party is introducing a bill in New South Wales to ban the use of random sniffer dog searches without a warrant at festivals, public transport, bars and Sydney’s entertainment precinct Kings Cross.

Photo: AP Photo

Daina Fletcher holds her 6-year-old terrier Lottie at the Sydney Opera House for a concert by Laurie Anderson.

Its member for the Sydney area of Newtown, Jenny Leong, said that only 2 percent of sniffer dog searches end in conviction (NSW police claim the figure is 70 percent), and that up to 10,000 people a year are falsely “identified” by the dogs of carrying drugs when they are not.

“The evidence is in: the drug dogs program doesn’t work,” Leong stated. “The New South Wales police have better things to do than wrongly humiliating thousands of mainly young and marginalised people.

This isn’t evidence-based policing. So what’s it about?” Civil rights groups and musicians also point out how searches at music events cause overdoses and hospitalization when panicking patrons swallow their entire drug cache to avoid detection.

“Nobody should be expected to undergo a strip search in order to enter a dance party or a music festival,” said dance music performer and producer Paul Mac.