The Supreme Court will be ruling on the use of “sniffer” dogs.
The US Supreme Court is to decide if the use of sniffer dogs outside public homes amounts to an illegal search.
My big issue is dogs don’t speak English, and dogs don’t sign affidavits, and while I’ve heard of dogs being put down for various reasons, Perjury is not one of them. The bottom line is if the dogs get excited the cops see that as probable cause. My issue is the dogs have a LOT of false alarms, as well as can take cues from the excitement of their owners (not even necessarily deceitful but pup can see officer friendly really thinks he has Sumdood the Drug Kingpin nailed, and react to that).
Really they’re a convenient tool of the police state, and there are NO checks against abusive use of police dogs. That’s enough to call it quits on them.
The prob here is not inaccuracy. The problem is that the SCOTUS has ruled that you must have probably cause before you subject someone to a search that exceeds what a normal human can smell, see, or hear without special equipment.
PDs have magically declared dogs to be equal to human officers in order to get around this. At which point, the k-9 handler pretends his dog is like Lassie, and can instantly tell him that Timmah is down the well.
probable *
I truly hate autocorrect.
Someone did a study, and found that reliably trained sniffer dogs, will alert false positives when the handler thinks theres a substance on site, even if there isn’t really. The study had the dogs and handler using short leashes as is standard in such searches. I hope they reproduce it with both long leads, and no leads (with the handler on the other side of the room) and maybe with no people present at all. I so believe that dogs are able to tell the difference, but they want to please rheir handlers too, so I don’t think they should be allowed to be used so indiscrimently.
I’m guessing you mean the study I linked to here. They got false positives on 84% of the 144 searches they did. Even more damning, the search points designed to trick the handlers (marked by the red slips of paper) were about twice as likely to trigger false alerts as the search points designed to trick the dogs (by luring them with sausages).
Search dogs are simply not reliable enough to be probable cause, period. The problem is getting the courts to recognize that fact.
The dogs reading cues is a problem I think. Dogs really aren’t that intelligent, but they’re very social and they’re tuned into human body language very well. I think it causes people to think they’re more intelligent than they really are.
Yes, dogs are susceptible to the Clever Hans effect. I mean if a horse can know to preform a certain action because it pleases his owner, then a dog certainly can.
As you say the problem is the dogs are justification, but have no culpability.
Good point about horses, they’re even less intelligent overall but can be highly trained and perform pretty complicated tasks and maneuvers. I think it really has to do with how social and motivated the animal is.
Hell, just having a dead cat lying under a bush in the front yard would probably get a dog excited. Dogs are smart for animals, but they aren’t smart enough to know why they are being used.