Sniffer dogs banned from schools

DURHAM -- A ruling by the Supreme Court of Canada last week that police who randomly search high school lockers with sniffer dogs are breaching privacy rights has little effect here in Durham Region.

The ruling came down following the acquittal of a Sarnia high school student charged in 2002 with possession of pot for trafficking. A police and canine unit arrived unannounced at his high school and confined students to classrooms for two hours while a drug-sniffing dog led officers to a pile of students' knapsacks, where some drugs were found. Last week's ruling states police officers who use dogs to find drugs in schools or other public places must be able to justify their search based on former crimes or major drug tips.

"This has been in the legal works for quite a while so it hasn't been our practice to use police dogs for random searches for a long time," said Mark Joel, superintendent of operations and transportation at the Durham District School Board. "Many years ago, it was a practice to have them do this randomly with the schools. If it was suspected more recently that a big drug deal was going down, then we'd have private agents we'd call who use dogs."

Joe Hircock, the DDSB's Whitby schools superintendent, said the board no longer uses private agencies with sniffer dogs.

"Once the Supreme Court started their investigation in Sarnia five years ago, we stopped utilizing the service of sniffer dogs altogether," he said.

"We've never had the police come in with dogs to search," said Paul Pulla, director of education for the Durham Catholic District School Board. "We did have a private kennel who ran dogs in secondary schools who could sense explosives. They'd do demonstrations of what dogs could do to educate students about anti-drug programs. And, years ago, we had to engage a kennel to come in because we'd had a bomb threat."

"Regardless of the Supreme Court decision, kids have gotten wise. They won't put drugs in their lockers or carry them on their person," said Mr. Pulla.

"The judgment is a reasonable compromise between law-enforcement aspirations to search indiscriminately, and the right to privacy. Now they need reasonable suspicion -- not a trumped-up profile or a pretext search based on speculation," said Frank Addario, president of the Criminal Lawyer's Association.

With files from Torstar News Services

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