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Comment by kentt | Hacker News Reader

I was under the impression that drug dogs we're mostly ineffective[1] anyway so this shouldn't be an issue. I guess this article would imply I'm misinformed. I'd welcome correction.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2015/08/04/...

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Drug dogs don’t need to be effective; they just need to establish probable cause.

That is to say, drug dogs are extremely effective, it’s just that their job is different from what their name might make you think.

As long as it doesn’t result in evidence being thrown out, a drug dog that alerts when drugs aren’t present is a feature, not a bug, for the police.

To put an even finer point on it, drug dogs don't need to establish probable cause, and they don't, they just provide a back door around the 4th Amendment.

Legally they check the box, which is the important part.

Yes drug dogs need to establish probable cause, that is how they meet the requirements of the fourth amendment.

So it's not the difficulty of untraining dogs, but the difficulty of untraining the handlers. Or the reason untraining drug dogs is difficult is that they hadn't actually been trained in the first place.

Yea well, tell that to the guy(s) who got pulled aside in-front of me for further searching at concerts and festivals.

Drug dogs are excellent at barking at the person their handler wants to search.

It's my understanding that that's trained out of them, and they are trained to stop and sit to signal their handler that they smell something (or whatever). This raises the question whether K9 "bite their arm off"[1] dogs are also drug dogs. I'm thinking "no," but I don't know.

1. https://www.fox4now.com/news/man-sues-punta-gorda-police-for...

you might like this https://youtu.be/QudO88GrqI0?t=47

About a decade ago I found this out the hard way... Damn dog missed over a hundred pounds of HE under its nose.

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