When you are the target (either current or upcoming) of crime and denying or delaying police access to evidence prevents them from dealing with it.
The simplest case is when you wee the obvious target of the past crime the police are investigating and it might recur or escalate, hence why people who don’t have a particular expectation of police animus tend to report crimes and freely cooperate with police in investigating them.
But this can be true even where you aren’t the obvious past victim.
Then why would the police need to search you, as opposed to you offering up evidence for them to write a crime scene report? And in this article's context of drug search dogs?
If police already are intent on searching you... then you are a subject of investigation.
> Then why would the police need to search you, as opposed to you offering up evidence for them to write a crime scene report?
In the simple case where you know that you are the obvious past target of crime...actually, they still might ask for consent to search beyond what you have initially offered up.
> If police already are intent on searching you... then you are a subject of investigation.
That’s probably technically true, but only because you used a word that you probably didn’t mean; basically, anyone whose conduct is on any way relevant to an investigation is a “subject”, you seem to intend to refer to a “target”.
But even if you are actually a target, unless you are maliciously targeted (which for sure happens far more than it should), inhibiting the investigation may just make you a target longer rather than getting LE to revise its theory of the crime. And the most likely people to be mistakenly-but-not-maliciously targeted (and also the nob-targets most likely to be subjects) are people with some other nexus to the crime, including people who might be in danger from it.
The simplest case is when you wee the obvious target of the past crime the police are investigating and it might recur or escalate, hence why people who don’t have a particular expectation of police animus tend to report crimes and freely cooperate with police in investigating them.
But this can be true even where you aren’t the obvious past victim.