Drug sniffing dogs
Well of course their accuracy might suffer a little if theyâre sniffing drugs.
anecdotally, Iâve read of cases where just about ANY behavior by the dog is interpreted as an âalertâ so the degree of training of the dog isnât the biggest issue.
If any of these dogs are laid off as a result of this investigation, Iâd be happy to adopt!
When theyâre being directed by the trainer of course theyâre going to be just as randomly correct.
So, they are less âdogsâ and more âprobable-cause-on-demand generatorsâ. Itâs a feature, not a bug.
We as citizens donât know what behavior a given dog exhibits as an âAlertâ
We donât know what a given dog has been trained to âalertâ to.
We DO know that dogs are incredibly easy to train to do almost anything.
We also know that police have shown time and time again that theyâll bend or break the rules, or have them rewritten in their favor in order to persecute who they thing the âbad guysâ are no matter what an individualâs guaranteed rights actually are.
Is it such a stretch to believe that the police might be training their dogs to alert on cue rather than in the presence of contraband? Or both? How can we know? How can we effectively defend against it?
Now if coins could fetch, it might be a toss-up
There was a mythbusters where they tried to hide drugs from a drug-sniffing dog and were unable to fool it. So there must be at least some that do their job correctly.
Theyâre way better than a coin toss, unless the coin is rigged.
There was a time when thanks to patriotic judges âlie detectorsâ were thrown out as evidence, will we also remove presumption of good faith in trained mobile probable cause generators and see SCOTUS rule out use of dogs as probable cause?
It is as bad as the 60s through the 80s in Oregon(Multnomah county sheriffâs and courtâs policy) when being inside any VW vehicle was considered probable cause.
Lots of sniffer dogs are actually trained with substitute odours, rather than the actual substances theyâll be looking for; there are commercial substitute scents available for cocaine, heroin, LSD*, and marijuana**. Also several varieties of corpse scent; fresh, post-putrefaction, and drowned.
*Can a dog really detect the scent from the fraction of a milligram of LSD in a single dose? Presumably this is mainly for detecting labs, rather than users.
**Not specified whether this applies to hashish as well.
If there are drugs, dogs are great at finding them.
If there are no drugs, handlers are great for using dogs to say there is probable cause and search whatever they want without a warrant.
Because dogs are great at finding drugs when they are there and because half the time they come up empty, shouldnât one conclude that half of the time itâs a waste of everyoneâs time and the dog is being taken away from actually searching for real drugs?
I donât know how to link to a specific comment on the WaPo article, so quoting one Mark Z. wholesale because I think he makes such a good point:
Drug dogs are a weird edge case. The most consistent legal category to put them in would be that theyâre a measuring instrument for detecting evidence beyond the reach of human senses, like a microscope or a mass spectrometer. The âdog alertâ is then an observation that the handler uses to draw a conclusion, rather than being treated as evidence. Of course then the handler would have to be qualified as an expert, and could be held accountable for her track record. Instead of âLex has a 40% false positive rateâ weâd be saying âLexâs handler has a 40% false positive rateâ. And then the police would get excoriated for putting such an unreliable âexpertâ on the stand, and the search of the vehicle would be inadmissible.
The way the Seventh Circuit approaches the case is to treat the dog as the expert witness. They talk about the dogâs training history, and they conclude that thereâs not enough evidence to say the dog was improperly trained. Problem: You canât cross-examine a dog. So theyâve created a category of magical expert witnesses whose reliability can never be challenged because they canât speak.
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