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Comment by lupire | Hacker News Reader

Alert dogs respond to handler signals and are used to fabricate probable cause, much like witching.

There should be a discouraging compensation paid to the suspect if their property is searched and nothing found. An "apologies for your trouble / time", and of course a hearty compensation for any damage done.

That would be gamed in a heartbeat.

It could only be gamed if dogs aren't accurately finding bodies.

Dogs aren’t accurately finding bodies and are often deployed even when cops know no body is present (such as a car). Now what?

Were you born after the 9/11 attacks?

Maybe cops shouldn't be doing that.

Exactly. Someone suggested we compensate people who are searched when nothing is found. The next person says that would immediately be gamed. I'm saying it would only be gamed if dog searches don't work.

Personally, I would like to see some sort of registration before an animal or device is used for a search. A search would be invalid unless it is applied for. Then the results must be entered upon completion (or assumed to be a failed search). Then we could see the results and how accurate these animals or "scientific" tests are in practice.

Instead we have warrants essentially backed by dogs who have no track record. The police are allowed to say, "the dog alerted, so drugs must have been present at some point and must have been moved." This has even led to further searches for where the drugs were moved to. All without anyone knowing the actual accuracy or effectiveness of a dog's search ability -- only that it was "certified".

It gets worse than that actually. There was a case where a cadaver dog was well regarded for always being able to find something. This was because the owner kept shards of bone and said the dog found this bone shard at the search. In your record keeping this dog would have 100% success rate and “prove” cadaver dogs really work.

What happens if it becomes a “the body must’ve been here at some point and then moved”? For example cadaver dogs have been used on cars, houses, etc. with clearly no body precisely to put under suspicion that a body was under temporary storage.

Paid by whom? In cases of police getting sued after a wrongful death, the municipality typically pays the bill. The police budget is unaffected. In such a system there's little incentive for police departments to be careful with which property they search, even if the owner is compensated.

>The police budget is unaffected

I would have to imagine that after several such incidents, the police budget would begin to be affected.

True, and that is a problem if peoples' properties get dug up, as a sibling comment notes. But, in contrast to drug dogs, where an alert creates probable cause for a search where things other than drugs can frequently be found, cadaver dogs typically either find remains or not. There generally isn't much else one can find digging around in the dirt that's incriminating, so, from a legal/justice POV, the harm of a false alert from a cadaver dog is much less than that from a false alert from a drug dog.

I heavily disagree with this notion. Cadaver dogs falsely alerting can tip police into arresting a suspect and bringing them in for questioning (this can often be newsworthy and cause one’s neighbors, community, the internet, and employment to also treat the person with suspicion or assume guilt) , or focusing on a suspect while not chasing other leads for an actual killer, or be used as circumstantial evidences at a trial even when no body is found. There have been cases where the cadaver dog alerts around a car, with clearly no body to be found, and this is used as circumstantial evidence that the car must’ve been used to carry a body.

This is one of the thoughts every now and then makes me happy to don't live in a society affine to the US culture, and sometimes I can't understand how people can't see how this messes everything up, this attitude of terminating the life of those who have just been suspected, by giving for granted that everyone is already guilty before the trial even starts is crazy, and makes the whole country more blackmailable, I can't imagine the amount of people who gave up to blackmail just because otherwise their life would be trashed

But to get back on point, what should the police do? They have an investigation to do and the dog trying to say something? Should we avoid questioning people just because society is fucked up?

Assuming people are guilty on mere suspicion isn't a US thing. It's a rich suburbanites who are never subjected to baseless fishing thing.

More than rich I would say it’s an evangelical / Protestant trait, somehow. I’ve experienced it in London, and Amsterdam that are anyway still evangelical, but absolutely not in Spain or Italy that are catholic

I’m not sure I’m not a religious scholar not believer but have still received a catholic education being Italian (went to catholic private schools) and a lot of things that I absolutely hate are mostly explained by people I talk to with being a result of evangelical education

What do you think? Might it be more cultural than related to status?

According to [1], the fraction of the USA that is evangelical has been declining: it claims white evangelicals made up 13% of the US population in 2018, while Catholics were 22%, and people with no religion were 21%.

[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/protestants-decline-religion...

I am not sure that what I was talking about is directly related to a change in beliefs, I am not a catholic, but nonetheless a lot of my decisions are affected by the catholic doctrine, even by "muscle memory", because my point of view has developed within the context of this culture, so I am not sure that going from 50% of people associated with a cult to 18% makes the drop in how people behaves also so marked?

Worth a read through just to see some examples of cadaver dogs being problematic.

https://www.science.org/content/article/should-dog-s-sniff-b...

It's amazing that a dog smelling odors could be evidence of anything, even taken in the context of other evidence. In my view the dog is simply a tool to find evidence. The tool indicating there is evidence is not evidence.

That's kind of the problem. If the dog indicates there's evidence in a place you can't get to (private property, for instance), the dog's indications can be used as evidence to get a warrant.

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