It's a state sanctioned violent gang that also happens to be completely immune from any sort of responsibility.
Totally different things.
"Nice." — LVPD, probably.
https://www.akc.org/expert-advice/news/meet-currency-detecto...
During a three-week period, fishermen fooled the Nazis and police dogs who
searched their ships – lacing handkerchiefs with a mixture of rabbit blood and
cocaine, in order to fool the dogs.
From the concept of "they'll only do that once, and probably be useless the rest of the day". ;)
"Canines are taught to detect concealed U.S. currency and firearms. Both the Officer/Agent and canine are taught the proper search sequences when searching vehicles, aircraft, freight, luggage, mail, passengers and premises."
I have no idea what the ratio of scientific backing vs. security theater is, though.
[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/minnesota/news/golden-valleys-new-k-...
[1] https://www.akc.org/expert-advice/news/meet-currency-detecto...
[2] https://www.cbp.gov/border-security/along-us-borders/canine-...
Yes, dogs give you a convenient excuse to produce 'probable cause' in order to authorise a search whenever you feel like it, because the signs the dogs give are interpreted by their handlers.
So it's not necessarily so much security theatre, as perhaps 'whitewashing' of evidence obtained in other ways. see eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
https://reason.com/2021/05/13/the-police-dog-who-cried-drugs...
That said, no one on the Internet knows that I am a dog.
Well, then I guess the handler can usually find probable cause!
Not necessarily if the experiment is double blind. (Or tripple blind I guess because it is the dog, the handler and the on-site experimenter who are not aware of where the samples are hidden.)
> Can't win against crooks.
That is the bigger problem.
How is the boot tasting this morning?
During this time someone could have similarly proved that it wasn't so because were it so surely someone could have challenged it.
An alternative explanation is that forensic science or indeed any sort of science as practiced by law enforcement has always been a joke and the bar to do something about it is always very very high.
The cost of challenging anything is often prohibitively expensive both in terms of legal costs and in risk of drawing a sentence several times worse than a plea and any case which might result in police losing a valuable tool can be mooted by simply dropping that particular case after that high bar is met.
Remember also that the prosecution and the judge aren't scientists but ARE colleagues. Perceptively evidence from dogs are brought only when they actually find something so even if they don't provably always "work" in the scientific sense they perceptively help them nail bad guys. The idea that the judge would be liable to remove that useful tool because it didn't pass scientific muster is both optimistic and naive.
https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/fbi-testimony-on-mic...
"To test this, we influenced handler beliefs and evaluated subsequent handler/dog team performance according to handler-identified alerts. The overwhelming number of incorrect alerts identified across conditions confirms that handler beliefs affect performance."
Police science is a parallel world of non-science. Over and over, fake science like hair id, bite mark analysis, fire, shaken baby, excited delirium, and others are debunked. But the courts have been terribly uninterested in hearing science contradict police-science.
But when I point that out I'm the delusional extremist.
You can disagree with civil forfeiture while agreeing with taxation, but not with general complaints about a state sanctioned violent gang stealing from the populace.
Taxes are impersonal. The rules apply to "everyone" [1]. They are written up, voted on (by congress) and so on.
Civil forfeiture is a random event made by a random cop on a targeted individual. It is the very definition of unfair.
Equally you can define taxation as "stealing" hut it's really not. (CF is stealing in my book). It was different in the past, but today taxation is used to pay for things - it doesn't just go to the bank account of a person.
-some- govt and govt services are necessary for society to function. (A quick look at places without govt demonstrate that.) And yes, one can argue about the priority of one service over another. But fundamentally govt serves the society and taxes is just the way that gets paid for.
The scale, priorities, spending of govt is obviously up for debate, but funding it is necessary, and so I don't consider taxes to be theft.
Incidentally, if you feel that all govt is bad and we should exist without one I recommend trying to live in a place where the govt is non-functioning. Thats when you discover where all that spending goes and what it achieves.
[1] for some definition of "everyone" - the system has flaws.