Are Police Dogs the Right Move for Utah Schools?

This op-ed originally appeared in Standard Examiner on October 1, 2024.

Do you want a police dog sniffing your child when they go to school?

That is Ogden School District’s answer to improving school safety. This comes following a tragic shooting that happened in Georgia a few weeks ago.

I get it. When something tragic like a school shooting happens, everyone wants to do what they can to prevent it from ever happening again. But at what cost?

Thomas Sowell famously said, “There are no solutions, only trade-offs.” In this same statement, he asks three really important questions that should be considered when making decisions like this: compared to what, at what cost, and what hard evidence is there?

Compared to what?

Introducing something like gun-sniffing dogs into schools may seem like a nice solution. Especially when compared to doing nothing. But there are other things that a school can do that don’t involve violating a student’s right to privacy.

Thirty minutes from Ogden is a school that has chosen a different solution.

Instead of acting on fear, Northwest Middle School in Salt Lake City has implemented a program to build a community at the school. The school’s methods involve some Harry Potter-type houses, and the effects are far reaching. Student absenteeism has improved. But more important to our current topic, incidents of bullying, fights and behavior referrals have decreased.

This is a different solution to school shootings and one that doesn’t violate a student’s rights.

At what cost?

What is the cost of having a police K-9 unit at a school? One article points out that training a police dog can cost anywhere from $15,000 to $20,000. That is a lot of money.

But there are other costs to a police dog at a school. What happens when a dog indicates that a student may have a gun on their person. The most likely thing is that the student’s bag is searched.

In most cases, submitting to a search is required for admittance to the building. The search may find a gun, but more often than not they find nothing.

There is another wrinkle to this whole scenario. Students in Utah, as in every other state in the U.S., are required to attend school. This is done through compulsory education laws. In some states, this is a criminal offense and children can be taken from parents if they don’t attend school.

So, a student is compelled by law to attend school. Once they arrive, a dog may indicate that they have something in the bag. If the student wants to learn that day, they must submit to a search or risk suspension.

You may be saying, “What’s the big deal? It is just a quick backpack search.” Well, the Constitution specifically protects us from unreasonable searches. A student forced to attend school and then submit to a search is unreasonable. They have no way to avoid the search. We are teaching students that they do not have a right to privacy.

What evidence do we have?

The entire premise of a K-9 search is that the dog has correctly identified something that should be searched.

But here is a secret, police dogs make mistakes. In fact, Utah courts have found police dogs to be unreliable.

Evidence shows that police dogs should not be used to search students.

What should be done?

What public schools don’t want to consider is that the system itself needs to change. Schools have become high-stress environments where individuality is discouraged. Pushing students to conform to arbitrary mile markers and an overemphasis on standardized testing are negatively impacting student mental health.

We need to change our view of what is and is not education. Northwest Middle School, mentioned earlier, has taken an important step. They created an environment where students feel wanted. More schools need to do this same thing.

Very few want to hear this truth. Public schools need to change.