Drug-Sniffing Dogs Reflect Police Bias

http://www.erowid.org/freedom/police/police_article1.shtml

by gnosis • 15 years ago

161 39 15 years ago

Huh? Dogs are brought so that the police can then do the search themselves. The police signal the dog to bark, and because of the barking justify their search. Not sure what the news here is.

gojomo• 15 years ago

Your cynicism has accurately predicted the gist of this article, but it may be news for others who see dogs as objective sensors.

shadowfiend3• 15 years ago

Including, specifically and problematically, the law.

earl• 15 years ago

This is well known to anyone who does scent work with their dog.

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.

[1] http://www.funnosework.com/

noahc• 15 years ago

When I was in high school I worked with k9 dogs a lot as an assistant trainer. This reminds me of a dog we had in that was deaf, but we had no idea until they hit the street.

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.

shadowfiend3• 15 years ago

Assuming this is corroborated by more studies, I wonder how long this would take to result in a change in the acceptance of dog sniffs as probable cause. Does anyone know of any precedent or previous situation where such a change happened?

epochwolf2• 15 years ago

It would require a court to change the precedence since probable is determined by the courts. It could happen fairly quickly if the right case was argued in the right court. Best case would still take years. I personally think it will take decades. Courts don't move quickly without pressure to change and police don't like to give up the powers they have.

shadowfiend3• 15 years ago

Yes, presumably. I guess I'm wondering what level of evidence/studies courts typically want in these situations before overturning precedent. Obviously it varies from court to court, though :)

Alex3917• 15 years ago

There have been other studies with similar results, e.g. http://norml.org/news/2011/12/15/false-alert-rate-for-drug-d...

TruthElixirX2• 15 years ago

Forever since the U.S. still uses fucking polygraphs in some cases.

ams61103• 15 years ago

Polygraphs are not admissible as evidence, nor is refusal to submit to one. They can be requested in interrogations if you agree, you may well be lied to about the results in an attempt to get a confession. You should never agree to take one if you find yourself in this circumstance.

Joakal• 15 years ago

In NSW, police with dogs are greatly disliked: http://www.nswccl.org.au/issues/sniffer_dogs.php

tl;dr: Dogs weren't effective, people were harassed, records say ineffective, ombudsman called on government to withdraw the abusive powers.

sonnym• 15 years ago

Barry Cooper, a former narcotics officer, explains in pretty great detail how they train with alert dogs:

http://youtu.be/F9pGylTSDj0

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.

ams61103• 15 years ago

Cited research: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3078300/

pittsburgh• 15 years ago

This reminds me of the story from about ten years ago about a racist police dog in Pittsburgh that would attack bystanders: http://www.oocities.org/ericsquire/articles/dogs/wtae030425.... and http://web.archive.org/web/20080503212841/http://dir.salon.c...

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.

tjarratt• 15 years ago

I'm a little surprised that there wasn't a valid google cache still kicking around for any of those dead links.

borism• 15 years ago

Google is for-profit organization. They're not interested in keeping stuff unless it makes them money.

Dylan16807• 15 years ago

Google often rapidly removes cache links for dead pages even though they're still indexed. Sometimes it takes weeks, sometimes it takes minutes.

parfe• 15 years ago

I won't trust my dog alone with my slippers, but the government and enough of the populace trust dogs to the point they gave dogs the power to revoke our civil rights.

rdtsc• 15 years ago

No they gave the police that power by letting them use dogs. I think at some point it was understood that the subjectivity of a dog's signaling interpretation can be used as a backdoor for searches. It is a clever trick and it works.

pessimizer• 15 years ago

This is video of stoned ex-drug cop Barry Cooper explaining how police can make their dogs false alert:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J41K2XHpNnE

And this is video of a cop doing it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hkw8KgZ_LhU

jws• 15 years ago

I wonder if repeated handler bias leads to a prejudiced dog. Then the animal would no longer need cues from the handler to perpetuate to unequal protection under the law.

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.

vidarh• 15 years ago

It's incredibly deep seated. We had a dog that we got through an animal shelter, and we knew that it hadn't been treated well by its former owner, but didn't really notice much for the best part of a year.

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.

davidw• 15 years ago

Please help keep this site about hacking and startups and articles that are actually intellectually interesting, rather than some sort of advocacy/"internet getting its dander up" by flagging articles like these. Thanks!

JoachimSchipper3• 15 years ago

[EDIT: this isn't getting the (positive) karma I expected it to. Anyone has a hint?]

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.)

eurleif• 15 years ago

>or that police dogs are more racist than police officers

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).

JoachimSchipper3• 15 years ago

Indeed. The article speculates that police dogs may pick up on their handlers' prejudices; but it does not show that. And even if dogs do pick up some prejudice, they may still be sufficiently objective to be used as probable cause.

morsch• 15 years ago

> 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?

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.

darklajid• 15 years ago

Let's look at the quote you present:

"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?

JoachimSchipper3• 15 years ago

Thanks for the explanation. Don't get me wrong, I think the War on Terror is even worse than the War on Drugs. I'll try to be clearer next time.

"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.)

derobert• 15 years ago

You need a very low false positive rate for something to be useful in screening for unlikely events. We can't compute the false-positive rate here, though, because we don't know how many people the dogs "scanned"—only how many positives they gave.

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.

stretchwithme• 15 years ago

There are false positives when using eyes to discover things as well. So the fact that dogs are biased and make mistakes doesn't concern me. Law enforcement is not a perfect weapon.

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.

Drug-Sniffing Dogs Reflect Police Bias

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