Why the comparison to a coin toss?
Reminds me of this old movie.
50/50 odds.
At that rate, you’re basically just guessing (or using it as a pretext for profiling …)
Below that rate you’d literally get better, more reliable results by tossing a coin. Unless the dogs are just being used as a trojan horse, in which case it’s all grotesquely unethical but otherwise working as intended.
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Consider time on the bench and you will see less of a correlation. The article you link to even points this out.
The fact is that Thomas and Scalia have over 90% agreement with each other and they are also two of the longest serving justices. That points to a stronger correlation over time.
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Queue thousands of officers nationwide ignoring this like they ignore all the other laws, and not being held to account for it.
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Dogs are way more fuzzy and adorable than analytical chemists. Also cheaper and better, er, ‘team players’, so to speak.
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Is it really teamwork when one participant just does whatever the other tells them to do? I thought being a team player was a social dynamic, rather than a dictatorship…
Of course, with me and my doge, it’s a benevolent dictatorship, but still, he’s not really a team member so much as a sentient vacuum cleaner that also loves me.
I was aiming for the HR-weaselspeak sense of ‘team player’, which is what staff who raise pesky objections are not. In that sense, dogs are about as good as they get.
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Breyer and Ginsburg only have 3 and 2 years more time on the bench than does Justice Thomas, so those are converging to the same spot. Again, I’d rather see a chart that trimmed out all the 9-0’s and many of the 8-1s as stuff like, say, water rights often doesn’t have a big ideological difference at that level.
So what you’re saying is: of those traffic stops in which the dog gave an alert, the attending cop would be better off flipping a coin. Have I got that right? This isn’t a setup, I just want to make sure that I understand your comparison.
Yes, that’s basically it.
Scenario A) Walk up to a car, flip a coin. Heads it’s an ‘alert’ and you can search the car, tails you can’t. Odds for any given car are 50/50 of getting searched. Of the cars you do search there’ll be some true-positives, and some false-positives, in proportions which will roughly match the overall population, rather than having relationship to your lucky coin.
Scenario B) Walk up to a car with a drug dog. If it ‘alerts’ you can search the car, otherwise you can’t. Odds on any give car are 50/50. Of the cars you do search there’ll be some true-positives, and some false-positives, in proportions that roughly match the overall population, rather than having any relationship to the skills of your supposedly highly trained dog.
But, actually, the dogs are often worse than just flipping a coin, especially if the driver is already guilty of driving while brown. Which means that using the dogs leads to a lot of false-positive searches. But that’s probably just a coincidence.
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Does anyone know if the suspect was being subjected to a Terry stop? I ask because my (limited) understanding of the law comes from a legal analysis of 99 Problems 
[quote]See, e.g., United States v. Hardy, 855 F.2d 753, 761 (11th Cir. 1988) (upholding Terry
detention to await drug dog for fifty minutes when officer developed reasonable suspicion during
stop based on passengers’ responses to questions about their identity and destination). [/quote]
http://www.slu.edu/Documents/law/Law%20Journal/Archives/LJ56-2_Mason_Article.pdf (pg 17)
If this was a Terry stop, the SC just overturned this, but if it wasn’t a Terry stop, they’ve basically affirmed what the circuit courts have been saying for awhile.
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