Your Rights When Approached by Police at Music Festivals
The hot weather is starting to kick in and with it, the festival season is upon us. Thousands of revellers are gearing up to take in their favourite live music acts, get down to some old skool beats, or spend...
Sniffer Dogs, Searches and Your Rights at Mardi Gras
With the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras Parade rocking Sydney today, we’ve compiled some basic information about police searches to help you have a blast without your rights being violated: When can police search me? It’s a sure bet that...
10 Tips For Staying Safe Over New Year’s
With New Year’s Eve just around the corner, it’s no doubt that police will once again be out in force patrolling the streets. Every year, police arrest a large number of people - many for alcohol-related offences. However, there are...
What are the Rules for Strip Searching?
“I removed my clothes one piece at a time as requested. When we had stripped down to our underwear in the street, we were searched. I honestly felt the only way to prevent the search becoming more intrusive or sexual...
Is a Positive Indication by a Sniffer Dog Enough for Police to Search You? Part 2: Applying Empirical Data
In Part 1 of this series, we outlined the law relating to ‘reasonable suspicion’. To re-cap, the law says that police can only search you for drugs if they have a ‘suspicion on reasonable grounds’ that you have drugs on...
Is a Positive Indication by a Sniffer Dog Enough for Police to Search You? Part 1: “Reasonable Suspicion”
We have posted numerous articles and videos about the fact that police cannot undertake random or arbitrary searches upon people - they must have a ‘suspicion on reasonable grounds’ before performing a search. This two-part blog aims to answer the...
Drug Detection Dogs Reportedly Providing False Leads
It has been revealed that the majority of strip searches by police based on indications from drug detection dogs do not result in any drugs being found. Government data obtained by the NSW Greens and reported in the media reveals...
Drugs and the white collar sector
A record number of 86,918 drug seizures were made in Australia according to the latest Illicit Drug Data Report by the Australian Crime Commission. But not all of these will make front page headlines or prime time news. The population...
Police Drug Dogs and Your Rights if They Touch You
Police drug dogs are a common sight at airports, music festivals and at any number of other places or events where police believe that there is a chance people may be carrying illegal drugs. The law states that police aren’t...
Sniffer Dogs: Providing a Factual Basis for Suspicion
In order for police to legally search a person, premises or vehicle for drugs, they need to have a ‘reasonable suspicion’ that an illegal substance has been concealed. If police don’t have a factual basis for suspicion and they search...
