That's actually not true. Do a quick search for "false alerts". You'll find that dogs 1) do false alert on their own, and that 2) some handlers deliberately induce false alerts to create a pretext for a search.
Also, police dogs don't have to be literally lethal in order to be classified as lethal force. All they need to do is be capable of causing grave bodily injury. Torn arteries, punctured testicles needing amputation,... And, all that assumes the dog does not break his training. No reason at all a police dog might not break his training and go for your throat once you're down. Dogs are predators. Nature gave them those teeth to kill their prey. They are absolutely capable of causing grave bodily injury.
Well friend, lets start in your neck of the woods.
http://reason.com/blog/2012/07/02/police-dog-named-bono-plays-by-own-rules
The Virginia State Police has at least one very dirty cop: a K-9 pooch named "Bono" that has an uncanny ability to detect illegal drugs. Especially when there aren't any present.
The four-legged crime fighter working for the Virginia State Police has been on a hot streak, detecting drugs nearly every time he’s on the job. In reality, however, illegal narcotics were found just 22 times of the 85 ‘alerts’ by the dog.
http://blog.norml.org/2011/02/04/drug-dogs-false-alert-over-200-times-in-uc-davis-study/
http://blog.sfgate.com/pets/2011/02...drug-sniffing-dogs-performance/#ixzz1D2nQC9Ir
The study, published in the January issue of the journal Animal Cognition, found that detection-dog teams erroneously “alerted,” or identified a scent, when there was no scent present more than 200 times — particularly when the handler believed that there was scent present.
The dog-handler teams conducted two separate, five-minute searches of each room. When handlers believed their dogs had indicated a target scent, an observer recorded the location indicated by handlers. All of the teams searched the rooms in a different order.
Although there should have been no alerts in any of the rooms, there were alerts in all of them. And more alerts occurred at the target locations indicated by human suggestion (red construction paper) than at locations of increased dog interest (sausages and tennis balls).
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/..._1_drug-sniffing-dogs-alex-rothacker-drug-dog
Drug-sniffing dogs can give police probable cause to root through cars by the roadside, but state data show the dogs have been wrong more often than they have been right about whether vehicles contain drugs or paraphernalia.
The dogs are trained to dig or sit when they smell drugs, which triggers automobile searches. But a Tribune analysis of three years of data for suburban departments found that only 44 percent of those alerts by the dogs led to the discovery of drugs or paraphernalia.
______
I would have to agree with Citizen, and then rebuke him for not noticing the fact I made the same point earlier, although with fewer story links.
