The fact that dogs are used for this enrages me.
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First: Police Dogs and Drug Dogs are different jobs and different dogs. Dogs are almost never trained to do both jobs. If they’re sending a Drug Dog to take down a suspect, they’re doing it wrong and endangering EVERYBODY.
Second: You can’t un-train a Drug Dog to find a substance. If you trained it to find marijuana, it will ALWAYS include marijuana as a trigger. You can’t tell a Drug Dog “Don’t find marijuana any more, but still find the cocaine.” If you want the dog to NOT respond to marijuana any more, that dog’s career is over. You have to train a new dog, one that never learned to respond to marijuana in the first place.
Because of these issues, YES: every police department that utilizes Drug Dogs will need enough financing to start from scratch and acquire new Drug Dogs, and until they do, they won’t have the capability of using Drug Dogs.
The issue is real, regardless of how silly it sounds on the surface. That’s not enough to ignore reconsidering your drug policies, but it has to be taken into account as an expense if/when that policy change could occur.
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Maybe they’ll have to purchase one or two fewer tanks or machine guns then.
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Would be nice.
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Solution: stop using drug dogs. Allow current dogs a happy retirement. Problem solved.
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Thats fucking dumb. Retire the dogs. Most of their handlers would adopt them, and the rest would be rehomed with the help of Shepard foster programs.
The war on drugs is the single largest program that has eroded the most civil rights.
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I’m sure most handlers enter the job understanding that it is a lifetime commitment, so why they complaining now?
Drug dogs - they’re not just for Christmas.
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This reminds me. Some of the first people I met at JUCO off campus were Lance and his roommate who had an Akita named Kita. He was a big floofy boi and we got a long well. Though the first time we met he barked at me, and the roommate asked if I had weed on me, as I guess Kita was a failed police dog. But no, no drugs.
I used to joke about him being so big, “Some day you’re going to say ‘Go get the paper, boy!’ and will come back with a child in his mouth, ‘Sir, is this your dog?’”
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So far this year, nearly 180,000 lbs of illegal drugs (excluding marijuana) have been seized at the U.S. borders. I’d wager nearly half or more were initially spotted by Drug Dogs, which were then verified mechanically. Drug sensors are just not as portable or fast as dogs. There is definitely a need for Drug Dogs.
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Ah. You need more. End the war on drugs too.
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Even without that assumption, how much of that is coming through MN?
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If a drug-sniffing dog finds someone carrying marijuana in a state where marijuana is illegal then the state will spend a lot of money arresting, prosecuting and incarcerating that person.
If a drug-sniffing dog finds someone carrying marijuana in a state where marijuana is legal then the state doesn’t have to pay for anything.
Even if all the false positives render a drug-sniffing dog useless, retiring and replacing the dog with a dog that’s only trained to sniff out hard drugs is still much, much cheaper than waging a war on marijuana.
The Republicans arguing against the decriminalization of marijuana based on fiscal concerns are not arguing in good faith.
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The unemployment rate for dogs is already staggeringly high. Taking away these dog’s jobs will strain our already overburdened canine unemployment compensation system.
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Yeah but those police pensions are expensive.
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I’m sure the dogs would be fine as well as good bois.
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No, and I bet police dogs don’t pay taxes, either.
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Interesting point!
Though I imagine many people here would be fine with the solution of “okay then have zero drug dogs” that might be politically harder to pull off.
I suspect the answer “we’re going to be just fine with the cost savings from not incarcerating people” has some merit - except if this is one of the districts where a private prison has a minimum occupancy clause in their contract…
In which case we should probably do something about that horrific situation too…
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