A large part of my understanding of this issue is funding. Anything privately purchased and funded is private; anything publicly funded is public.

If we continue with the parked car analogy, I believe police have the right to search around your car in a parking space but not in your car. However, if they find blood dripping from the trunk… well I think that’s cause for a search. Should the police have been searching the parking spot around the car? I can’t answer that, but it’s public space so they have every right to do so.

Further then, I believe that a locker is public space, or more in the public domain than not and therefore can be searched. I don’t believe police have the right to go into a knapsack in a locker. However, if they’ve got the locker open and a sniffer dog discovers “something”, from that point onwards the police have reasonable cause to search the bag too. Not dissimilar from the situation of the car in the parking space with the blood dripping from it.

It’s splitting fine hairs on a definition but to me it’s very big. I don’t believe a student has a right to privacy in a publicly funded space, clearly you (and the Supreme Court of Canada ) think otherwise. I don’t know if you’ve read the conclusions of the court case but that’s where the issue centres and that’s where we disagree it seems.

If I may quote the judge’s words “The pivotal question in this appeal is whether A.M. had a reasonable expectation of privacy in respect of odours imperceptible to humans that emanated from his unattended backpack in a school gymnasium.”

(Additionally, I’d like to point out that this case was not strictly about locker searches. I didn’t know this at the time and I had considered writing an addendum but decided against it. Here’s the initiating incident of the case that I discovered only later: “In the gymnasium, where there were no students, the dog indicated to his handler that he smelled drugs in a backpack lying with others next to the wall.” So my initial argument about the locker is moot because the lockers were searched after this bag was discovered.)

Anyway, thanks for posting . Please keep on doing so.

One more thing, I think the issue of body searches are a very sticky subject as well. I haven’t found a conclusion that I’m satisfied with in my own mental wanderings on that topic.

By the way, just since we haven’t been introduced at all, I’m an old classmate’s of Adam and currently work at a high school and a police academy in Japan, so I have a bit of a vested interest in these issues.

If there’s one thing I respect about Japan, is that the students are well behaved, rarely disregard the rules, and no one steals anything. In Canada it’s quite the opposite. The Japanese don’t have lockers though, so this wouldn’t apply to them. Although, if it came to a search, the Japanese teachers have absolute power and can search anything they like. The parents can’t even tell them what do during class time. I’ve never seen the power abused though.