In news that is sure to shock precisely nobody, research has found that drug sniffer dog operations by New South Wales Police disproportionately target areas with high Indigenous populations. The research from the Greens found that a person is 6.5 times more likely to be searched by a drug sniffer dog in the five areas of Sydney with the highest populations of Indigenous people aged 18 – 35.

Greens MLC David Shoebridge, a longtime critic of the sniffer dog program, which he argues is ineffective, discriminatory and possibly dangerous, says that this data merely proves the wrongheadedness of NSW’s program.

“This data confirms a long-running suspicion about the police drug dog program,” he told the Sydney Morning Herald. “The police have never been able to explain why a train station like Redfern, with a high population of students and Aboriginal people, is constantly hit with drug dogs despite having one of the worst results at finding drugs.”

The research, which analysed census data and available police statistics, also found that sniffer dogs are generally pretty woeful when it comes to actually finding drugs – with more than half of searches in 90% of police commands turning up nothing.

The analysis also found – also quite obviously – a socioeconomic factor: a $10,000 dollar decrease in an area’s average annual income resulted in a 1.3 per cent increase in search activity. Maybe it’s just hard to get sniffer dogs into the VIP areas in Double Bay. Who knows.

A police spokesperson disputed the data to the Herald, claiming that demographics are not taken into account when planning sniffer dog operations.

The demographics of an area are not taken into account in these decisions. Decisions on where to deploy detection dogs are intelligence-based and focus on locations where the use and supply of illicit drugs is known to have an increased prevalence.

Shoebridge and the Greens maintain a Facebook page named Sniff Off! which advocates for sniffer dog reform and encourages users to identify the whereabouts of known sniffer operations.

Source: The Sydney Morning Herald.

Photo: Getty Images.