Drug-Sniffing Dogs Reflect Police Bias
erowid.org
erowid.org
Tangent: I'm extremely frustrated at how ephemeral web pages are. I googled the story to provide a reference, and the most reputable sources for the story are dead. I found 404s on Salon.com, Fox News, the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, and PBS.org. Sadly, I found some of these links on a racist forum. It sucks that Storm Front keeps bytes around longer than these other sites.
Anyway, I just donated $25 to archive.org to support what they're doing. I've been using the Wayback Machine for years and always took it for granted. I'm not sure what made things different about tonight's frustration at broken links, but for the first time I just became worried about the preservation of history.
I do a game called k9 nosework with my corgi. You take a qtip dipped in certain scents and hide it in boxes in the beginning then progressing to furniture and outside areas. The game is for the dog to find the qtip and identify; there's even a contest / sport [1]. If you decide to do the sport, the handler has to read the dog and decide if the dog is identifying a given bit of car or whatever as the location of the goal scent or if the dog is just sniffing. The point of this rambling is even the plain trainers that do k9 nosework know that the handler has to go blind and can't know where the scent is or the dog will learn to read the handler instead of learning to use its nose to find the scent. The idea that the police are unaware of this is ludicrous, since this sport grew out of nose training for police dogs, and it's a major training obstacle.
We had trained the dog for 2-3 months just like any other k9 and everything seemed normal. The officer came for their week long training period and get to know the dog period everything was okay and any of the issues seemed minor and they were dismissed as just the dog and human learning to get to know each other.
Then the dog hit the streets and had tons of issues and we couldn't figure it out. Finally, after a bunch of trouble shooting we had the dogs hearing checked out. The dog was deaf, but how could it know the commands when it was in front of the officer or trainer? We're not 100% sure, but we noticed that based on the commands given and the person giving the commands often times they would assume a certain stance. Other times we found the trainer would bounce/not bounce the ball based the command given. The dog could feel the ball bouncing and tell the trainer had taken up a different stance based on the command.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J41K2XHpNnE
And this is video of a cop doing it:
A lot of the video isn't particularly relevant, but he does discuss how the officers are trained to incite the dog to alert and how the desire for the ball is a prey drive.
tl;dr: Dogs weren't effective, people were harassed, records say ineffective, ombudsman called on government to withdraw the abusive powers.
I'm regularly embarrassed by my own little dog who for 10 years has been an incorrigible racist. She came as a puppy from the breeder with a deep seated hatred of black men, men in hats, and anyone on a bicycle which we have been unable to train out or even suppress. We just pretend she barks at everyone.
Then winter came, and one day I took him out while I was removing snow from the driveway. The instant I put on gloves he totally changed. He started circling me at high speed (he was built to run fast) and would snarl and try to bite my hands. Took the gloves off, and he'd instantly turn back into the most loveable dog ever. Back on, and the process was repeated.
This being in Norway, getting aggressive towards people with gloves on during winter was a bit of an issue, but at least once we knew we could keep a extra solid grip on the leash while walking him at winter. Thankfully he'd need to be quite close to someone before it was an issue.
I'm more concerned that that weapon is pointed at your civil liberties. What you put into your body or do with consenting adults is of no proper concern of government.
The precedent affects the directions given to the jury by the judge, and can generally only be changed by an appellate court ("the direction given by the judge in x case was incorrect and therefore the conviction should be overturned/the case retried").
Regardless of the direction given, juries are generally entitled to return whatever verdict they want (see jury nullification). If a judge (correctly) directs them that a sniffer dog alert constitutes cause for a search they may still acquit.
Isn't it obvious that I meant "precedent" in the sense of "a jury found this expert's testimony to be credible once, and therefore is likely to do so again"?
Seems like the "for future defense lawyers" should have been enough of a clue to head off the pedantic hair-splitting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygraph#United_States
But, last I checked, polygraphs were required for certain government positions in the U.S, but am having a problem finding a citation for that right now.
It appears some states may allow the results to be presented, but sounds like it cannot be required.
This article isn't nearly as convincing as the author hopes. (S)he mainly argues that drug dogs catch too many innocents to allow them to be used as "probable cause" for searches. However,
"The [extensive] review [of the Austrialian New South Wales Ombudsman] found that illegal drugs were found in only 26% of all searches that were initiated after a handler indicated that a dog alerted on the subject."
If there were a cheap-ish test that detected bombs with this accuracy, wouldn't we want to use it? Even if a few innocents would be unjustly searched?
I also agree with the author that we should look more closely at methodological issues of drug dogs; but this article is only convincing if you support the underlying premise that drugs aren't (all that) bad. (I do.)
(The article speculates that police dogs could be trained by their handlers to alert e.g. on blacks, but doesn't show that this actually happens, or that police dogs are more racist than police officers. The article also argues that dog-based evidence is not very strong, but only cites a case where it was thrown out; and "probable cause" is far weaker than "sufficient evidence to convict" anyway.)
I think the point is that police dogs are supposed to be LESS racist (and more objective) than police officers, since they can be used as probable cause for a search (unlike an officer's hunch).
Good point, though it's slippery slopes everywhere you look: What it if works on bombs, but only in 1% of the cases? What about 0.01%? What if we had a similar test for other, more trivial misdemeanours?
Either way, I'm sure that even fairly strict prohibitionists will agree that carrying around a bomb is a more significant threat to others, so it shouldn't be surprising that a more significant invasion of people's rights is tolerated. How much bigger the threat and how tolerable an intrusion is in each instance, that's exactly the crux of the matter. I suppose that was your point, too.
Edit: Another point: Seeing this, it's not surprising that there is such a range of opinion about it. People have very different evaluations towards the threat posed by drugs, and different people also have very different attitudes about how tolerable those kinds of intrusions are. This opens up a 2D space, where I suppose people often fall on a diagonal or end up in opposite corners.
"26% of all searches found drugs"
I think everything afterwards goes downhill:
- 'cheapish test to detect _BOMBS_'
How did we end up with bombs now? A second ago we were talking about (recreational?) drugs. Are you pulling the 'War on Terror' card here?
- '_cheapish_'
Backed up by what? What are the costs of training and keeping (feeding, medical treatment, housing) the dogs? Bringing the officers to search in the first place? What are the costs of the individuals being searched, who probably had to stop right there for quite a while and to sit back and wait.
- 'a _few_ innocents would be unjustly searched'
74 out of 100. 740 out of 1000. 7400 out of 10000. If 3/4 are 'few', where's 'half' and 'most' located on that scale?
"Bombs" is intended to mean "something that we can all agree is really bad". I intended to say "the costs seem acceptable if they stop something really bad" (exaggerating for effect, "nobody who's not already in favour of legalisation is going to buy this argument"). Remember that many think that drugs are really bad.
(Some of the data you requested, although I don't think it helps much: http://people.howstuffworks.com/police-dog2.htm suggests that a police dog costs $8500 to acquire. Housing a dog in a shelter costs ~$3000 over the dog's lifetime, IIRC; so $15000 seems a reasonable guess at a dog's lifetime cost. I didn't find the number of active dogs or the cost of officer training, which would be required to calculate cost/successful search.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Drugs: "In 2008, 1.5 million Americans were arrested for drug offenses. 500,000 were imprisoned." Even if we assume that this corresponds to 1.5 million successful searches after a dog alerted, you'd get 6 million searches per year, or about one search every fifty years per American. Of course, that assumes those searches will be randomly distributed; but still, if I felt that drugs were really bad and could be stopped by repression, I'd consider that a reasonable price to pay.)
Take an example: assume you have a detection technology that has a 1% false positive rate. That is, if you scan 100 people (without bombs) you get 1 positive (which is false, of course). Ignore for a moment any false negatives (people with bombs that are missed); assume the false-negative rate is 0.
Now, what is the chance of a random person you're screening having a bomb? It's very low. Consider that there are nearly a billion air passengers per year in the US, and almost no bombers. Let's say one in 200 million passengers has a bomb.
So, you screen 1 billion passengers, you get 5 true positives. You also get 1% false positives—that is, 10 million.
So, you unjustly searched (as you put it) 10 million people to catch 5 (not 5 million, just 5). And also, its not cheap anymore; you're spending a lot of time (thus money) on those 10 million useless searches.