Sebastian at Obsidian Wings wrote a post that probably got lost in the holiday shuffle, but it's something incredibly serious, which is the use of drug dogs as nothing more but an excuse to turn illegal searches into legal ones. Turns out the dogs are probably not sniffing drugs so much as they're reacting to their master's subconscious signals that they want to search Person X. This is an important issue for everyone, but skeptics especially need to be on this, because it's really ovious what's going on here, which is that drug dogs are a modern update of the Clever Hans problem.
Clever Hans (in German, der Kluge Hans) was an Orlov Trotter horse that was claimed to have been able to perform arithmetic and other intellectual tasks.
After a formal investigation in 1907, psychologist Oskar Pfungst demonstrated that the horse was not actually performing these mental tasks, but was watching the reaction of his human observers. Pfungst discovered this artifact in the research methodology, wherein the horse was responding directly to involuntary cues in the body language of the human trainer, who had the faculties to solve each problem. The trainer was entirely unaware that he was providing such cues.[1] In honour of Pfungst's study, the anomalous artifact has since been referred to as the Clever Hans effect and has continued to be important knowledge in the observer-expectancy effect and later studies in animal cognition.
Sebastian recounts research showing that dogs' tendency to signal has more to do with what the cop is thinking than what the dog is smelling. Anyone who knows dogs should have guessed this one; dogs are basically human-obsessed machines who watch their humans super carefully and try very hard to please them. Of course drug dogs are more worried about pleasing master than producing good results. The real world results are predictable, but no less upsetting for it:
A tracking study was done of drug sniffing dogs in Illinois which found that the searches their 'alerts' triggered found no evidence of drugs 56% of the time. For Hispanic people searched as a result of the 'alerts' there was no evidence of drugs 63% of the time.
You can read about it at the Chicago Tribune. The cops are pulling the "well, they're guilty of something" bullshit, saying the dogs are smelling drugs that used to be there. Maybe. But again, I point to the well-documented Clever Hans effect and suggest that it's something else entirely, which is that the dogs are picking up on the officers' prejudices and acting accordingly.
Obviously, the ultimate goal here is to call off the War on (Some People Who Use) Drugs, which is run on magic and bigotry, and does more to destroy communities than to prevent drug addiction. But in the more immediate future, we must demand an immediate end to all use of drug dogs, certainly until it can be demonstrated in double blind studies run by experts that the dogs are detecting drugs and not reacting to subconscious signals sent by police. Since I highly doubt that can be demonstrated, basically I'm saying that drug dogs should be permanently banned. Even if they worked, they're basically a cheap attempt by law enforcement to skirt constitutional protections, but since they don't even work, they're nothing but a magic trick used to distract from what's really going on: cops conducting illegal searches based on their own prejudices.
So, I was gone Friday-Monday, and away from the internet. I was in the city of my birth, El Paso, TX. I occasionally get to go back to my second favorite city in Texas (with Austin being an easy first), though I rarely get to stay long enough to do what I really love doing there, which is hitting downtown and thrift shopping. Still, a little listening and looking, and I got a taste of what life’s been like these past few years there, and how much things have changed while everything continues to look the same.
See, geographically, El Paso is part of a bigger metroplex area—-it’s all one big city with Ciudad Juarez, with a very thin Rio Grande and the mountain pass it cut (the Paso that gave El Paso del Norte its name) separating the Mexican side from the American side. Juarez is the much bigger city, but both cities sit in the valley of their little spate of Rocky Mountains. The entire area suffers from dryness, hot sun, and unreal amounts of smog that is trapped by the mountain range and hangs over the city, giving me a sore throat by day #3 there. Most of my life, I felt like the fates of Juarez and El Paso were intertwined in such a way as to be functionally inseparable. People traveled back and forth with ease, both commuting for work (as my Spanish professor for summer courses at UTEP did), and for fun and shopping. That changed a little after 9/11, when the government revoked the right to cross the border without a passport. But things didn’t really get weird until this functional civil war with the drug cartels broke out.
Now it seems like El Paso and Juarez are worlds apart, even as they look even more like one city. (In the past, at night, you could see a clean border between the cities because Mexico had a different standard light bulb than the U.S., which led the lights in El Paso to be a light yellow but the lights in Juarez to be a greenish white. Now they all look the same, though the Mexican side of the border still twinkles because fewer people have their lights on.) El Paso is peaceful and quiet, and it’s consistently in the top 5 safest large cities in America. This, despite its outrageous poverty, the ability of criminals to border hop to escape detection, and of course, the fact that it’s in the same spot on the globe as what is becoming the most dangerous city in North America.
You can hear from a distance how bad Juarez has gotten, or you can hear it up close. The murder rampage is simply on people’s minds. What used to be a regular part of visiting El Paso—-going to Juarez for a drink and some shopping—-is basically unthinkable now. The people of El Paso are as content as the people of Juarez are fearful, and that feels dramatically off, almost impossible, really. But what really blew my mind was when we were standing in the hotel lobby waiting for our cab to take us to the airport, and I saw they were giving away copies of the El Paso Times. I casually picked one up and saw this story.
Juárez cancels Sept. 16 celebration
For the first time since the Mexican Revolution, Juárez city government has canceled the festivities of one of Mexico’s most patriotic holidays.
“First comes the safety of the population,” said Juárez Mayor José Reyes Ferriz. “Because of threats, because of criminal activities that exist in Juárez, we don’t want to take any risks.”
On the eve of Sept. 16, mayors in Mexico lead crowds at city hall esplanades in the traditional ceremony of grito de independencia, or call to independence.
¡Viva México! were the words shouted the same day by Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla in 1810, when he launched the rebellion against the Spanish crown.
It’s basically like canceling the 4th of July. But it’s understandable, of course. Since 2008, there have been 6,200 murders in a city of about 1.3 million people. I know intellectually about the murders, the curfews, the kidnappings, and the general climate of fear. Still, seeing this simple story about the cancellation of the Sept. 16th celebrations really drove home to me how much Juarez has really fallen to pieces, and is basically a war zone. We would stand on the hotel balcony and overlook Juarez and it was almost impossible to believe. Obviously, it looks as quiet and normal as it ever did. Only at night do you even get a hint of it, as the city looks darker than it should.
Of course, the way this tends to translate into American self-centered craziness is by reinforcing the hysterical racism in places like Arizona. Passing laws to antagonize immigrants and people suspected of being immigrants—-or beefing up border security to pander to racists despite the fact that there’s no real reason to believe the war is leaking over in anyway—-is straight forward asshole behavior. The worst part about all this is that the United States does play a role in all this, but it’s in a way that we, as a nation, don’t want to talk about. The reason this kind of stuff concentrates on the border is because Americans exert such a powerful demand for illegal drugs that are either manufactured or at least routed through Mexico. Conservatives are keeping us busy with their screeching about non-existent crime on the American side of the border and non-existent threats from illegal immigrants, but no one is talking about what we could do to relieve this horror show in Mexico that we played such a major role in creating. Which isn’t to say that Mexico doesn’t have its own problems with waging a pointless War on Drugs as a bit of moral showboating and a form of control exerted on disenfranchised citizens. But again—-border town, American demand, and the criminal element has everything to do with the fact that Americans are so hellbent on keeping drugs illegal and dedicating outrageous amounts of resources towards attempting to stop the flow.
We should be ashamed of ourselves. Deeply, deeply ashamed of ourselves. It’s amazing to me that over this past weekend, the Glenn Beck rally was only the second biggest reason looming in my mind for why Americans should be ashamed of ourselves. Of course, part of that is because Tea Crackers are such a clown show, but the War on Drugs is something even supposedly smart people mindlessly keep backing.
“Huffington Post has created a computer that generates stories based on click-happy tags.” That was my first thought upon reading this alarmist article about how teenage kids are getting high off the internet. No, I’m not kidding. The headline actually reads: “DIGITAL DRUGS: How Teens Are Using The Internet To Get High”. Clearly, this is a computer-generated headline, I thought. They don’t even care anymore; whatever it takes to get clicks.
But I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt and actually dig in and read a little more of the story. Unfortunately, I have to report that what I learned wasn’t enough to relieve my concerns. Indeed, the article seemed to be reporting on something that’s actually happening, but their take on it is some of the saddest shit I’ve seen from adults since I saw that evangelical program on an access channel back in college about how Satan reaches kids through not just heavy metal, but backmasking records and even through Whitney Houston.
The trend, called i-Dosing, is a supposedly “legal” and “safe” way to alter one’s consciousness.
According to Kansas News 9, these “digital drugs” use “binaural, or two-toned, technology to alter your brain waves and mental state,” producing a “state of ecstasy” for the user. i-Dosers listen to these atonal tracks while sitting motionless with headphones on.
It may sound benign, but parents, educators and law officials are worried that i-Dosing could be addictive, harmful, and a gateway “drug” to other illegal substances. The Oklahoma Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs has taken an interest in the phenomenon. “Kids are going to flock to these sites just to see what it is about,” the Bureau’s spokesperson Mark Woodward told Kansas News 9, “and it can lead them to other places.”
As someone who spent her teen years in a boring ass small town, I had a strong suspicion that whatever the specifics, that this was almost surely a parlor trick that, because it’s in the hands of teenagers, is being blown up as something it’s not for maximum effect. There wasn’t a parlor trick that we didn’t indulge as kids, and many of them, such as “light as a feather, stiff as a board”, had a pseudo-occult feel to them that gave us all a good scare before we forgot about it a couple hours later. Hey, you got to get your thrills where you can. Eventually most of us discovered sex and left the world of adolescent parlor tricks behind. That this is framed by kids who pass it along as being like drugs should be a relief to parents, because it means said kids have no experience with actual drugs.
TPMCafe is having a Book Club for Jessica Valenti’s new book The Purity Myth, and I’ve been asked to blog for it. I used by first blog post to explicate the two general arguments for the necessity of controlling and punishing female sexuality, what you might call the malevolent and benevolent patriarchy arguments. The latter argument is just a PR stunt, and I don’t really see too many strong believers in it that don’t come across as feeble-minded (like K-Lo), but it’s the preferred strategy right now, because it just reads better in mainstream media spaces to say that you want to control female sexuality for women’s own good. Occasionally, you’ll see this patronizing attitude get labeled as “feminism”, which you get with the group Feminists For Life, who actually claim that they want college women who have sex to be forced to bear children for their own good.*
Message control has been hard, however, because most conservatives still prefer to paint women with any degree of sexual independence as a Fifth Column, Our Ladies of Emasculation. Painting sexually active women as broken victims of feminism coupled with predatory male sexuality might make it easier to pretend you mean well when you go on “The Today Show”, but it’s also just less fun and feels dishonest. The urge to punish and freak out tends to surface fairly quickly, which is why the people who got arrested and charged with child pornography in the “sexting” case were girls. In the new, improved benevolent patriarchy, it would have been better to paint the girls as victims of male sexual demands, and to offer that the only protection for them is to strip them of their autonomy for their own good, but it’s just not as satisfying that way. Plus, it leaves the door open to prosecuting the boys, which is unacceptable to both non-crazy types, but also “boys will be boys” wingnuts.
When a Fairfax County mother got an urgent call from school last month reporting that her teenage daughter was caught popping a pill at lunchtime, she did not panic. “It was probably her birth-control pill,” she thought. She was right.
Her heart dropped that afternoon in the assistant principal’s office at Oakton High School when she and her daughter heard the mandatory punishment: A two-week suspension and recommendation for expulsion.
One of the biggest obstacles to massive decriminalization and perhaps even legalization of marijuana has been the loudest advocates of this policy. There was a surge in pro-legalization organizing and sentiment a few years ago in Austin, and the only result I’ve seen is that the cops came down like a sack of hammers on pot smoking, which used to be tolerated to a much larger extent than it is now. Seriously, when I first lived in Austin, someone who wanted to sit on her front porch smoking a joint rarely had to worry about any harassment, so long as she reasonably quiet about it. I don’t know the last time I saw someone publicly smoking a joint outside of the context of a really crowded rock show, and even then it’s a much smaller amount of people—-I used to be surprised if I didn’t smell pot at a show, now I’m mildly surprised if I do. Of course, with the overall decline in popularity of smoking, pot may be losing out, too, but I’d honestly be surprised since the percentage of pot smokers who smoke tobacco is probably about the same as the general population.
Before I digress further, I’ll say that I remember that back in the more liberal days the pro-legalization people were everywhere, and they had the deadly mix of hippieness and more than a whiff of crankery that made even people who agreed with their general points run in the other direction when you saw them descending on you with their pamphlets about how hemp can cure cancer, their tie dyed Bob Marley shirts, and their dopey smiles. If that’s the face of your movement, no wonder they’re doomed to fail. I wanted pot to stay illegal just to annoy them. But don’t take my word for it—-Obama hid behind this living stereotype in order to dismiss the people going on and on about it. Will Wilkinson describes what happened.
“The answer is no, I don’t think that is a good strategy to grow our economy.” President Obama said it with a chuckle last week at a town hall-style forum. The idea was for Obama to answer some questions about the economy submitted to the White House website. The most popular ones all had something to do with the virtues of legalizing and taxing marijuana. “I don’t know what this says about the online audience,” Obama joshed, and the good Americans assembled at the forum shared a little laugh.
Here’s a story I rarely see much about on blogs, even though it seems to me that it goes into the file “Big Fucking Deal”. There were a bunch of demonstrations on the border in Juarez, Nuevo Laredo, and Reynosa Tuesday, and more in Monterrey, all blocking traffic in some form, but in the border towns, they were blocking the bridges into the U.S. So, in my mind, it’s a ploy to get some American media attention to a story that’s flying mostly under the radar, and I suppose it worked, because my mom told me that they were covering it on Fox News. (And, in the grand tradition of grabbing every opportunity for racist hysteria that they get, it seems they were implying that the protests were riots.) It doesn’t seem to take a lot of people to snarl traffic across the border—-only 30 people, mostly women and children, were able to stop traffic for an hour on the Paso del Norte bridge, which I remember as being already a site of dead stopped traffic in the days before 9/11 gave them further excuses to beef up “security”, and so my heart goes out to the innocent people, many who commute across that bridge every day for work, stuck in what must have been the mother of all traffic jams.
What they were protesting was the presence of the military all over the area to police the area. Occasional bouts of unofficial martial law are far from unknown on the U.S.-Mexico border, though they don’t get much attention from the mainstream media. Alas, it’s not that easy to separate the villains and the heroes in this story, because while martial law, official or not, is one of those human rights violations that we strive as an evolved species to avoid, the Mexican government has a mother of all problems on their hands, and it’s hard to fault them for trying to fix it. In this case, the ongoing war between drug cartels in Mexico has grown especially hot in our troubled days, and the year 2008 saw at least 6,000 murders related directly to the drug trade.
You heard me right—-6,000 murders. Right there in the AP story, if you don’t believe me.
More than 6,000 people were killed in drug violence last year.
I’ve been saying this for years, and I’m glad that it’s finally catching on as part of the argument for why the federal government should make a huge investment in making American cities more walkable—-they reduce drunk driving. Drinking is right up there with butt sex in topics that policy-oriented people don’t like to talk about, because talking about makes people think that maybe you do it, and god forbid people think that, because then you won’t be considered a serious person anymore. I don’t think the taboo that’s grown up around it is such a good thing, though, because it does create these situations where people hypocritically avoid talking about realistic ways to push for more responsible drinking, and teetotaler groups like MADD dominate the conversation. And since their solutions are all punishment oriented, I think there’s a limit to how much good they can do. Stiff fines for drunk driving work up until a point, but if you don’t offer people a realistic alternative, you’re still going to have a whole lot of people playing the odds that they won’t get caught, and thus a whole lot of drunk drivers who are risking accidents.
Austin on the whole isn’t a walkable city, but central Austin is pretty good, with lots of buses and cabs downtown, and so I’m never even remotely tempted to get behind a wheel if I go downtown and drink. Bus downtown, cab back, because sadly, unless you go home before 11 PM, you can’t take the bus back, at least to my neighborhood. They’re smart enough to have late night buses running from downtown to neighborhoods that have the highest concentration of college students. Which is smart, because a lot of college kids who don’t want to spring $10 for a cab back will drive downtown just so that they have a car to drive back with. Yes, yes, yes, yes, I’m aware that if they have money for booze, they should have money for a cab, but I suspect that grousing and scolding isn’t going to change this calculation any time soon, so it’s time for us to work with the kids that we’ve got instead of the ones that we want.
Via Brian and John Cole, the victims of the War On Drugs (that would be ordinary taxpayers and citizens who are being bled dry only to have basic constitutional rights revoked because they make it hard to bust drug users) scored a small victory as a resistance group caught some crooked ass cops in Odessa, TX* lying on warrant affidavits in an effort to snag some drug dealers, and of course make a little money off asset forfeiture.**
KopBusters rented a house in Odessa, Texas and began growing two small Christmas trees under a grow light similar to those used for growing marijuana. When faced with a suspected marijuana grow, the police usually use illegal FLIR cameras and/or lie on the search warrant affidavit claiming they have probable cause to raid the house. Instead of conducting a proper investigation which usually leads to no probable cause, the Kops lie on the affidavit claiming a confidential informant saw the plants and/or the police could smell marijuana coming from the suspected house.
The trap was set and less than 24 hours later, the Odessa narcotics unit raided the house only to find KopBuster’s attorney waiting under a system of complex gadgetry and spy cameras that streamed online to the KopBuster’s secret mobile office nearby.
—Just about anyone under the age of 60 who has lived in this permissive society during the past 40 years, has done something that might be unfit for a Hallmark Greeting Card. In fact, I have profound qualms about any would-be politician who hasn’t allowed him- or herself a moment of untrammeled human or chemical exploration. I fear that the media have driven an awful lot of interesting people away from public service for reasons that would have seemed extreme to the second generation of New England Puritans.
The ACLU Reproductive Rights Project sent a press release to me to alert me that they, in conjunction with other branches of the national organization and with the Arizona branch, are filing three separate cases against Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County. The reign of Arpaio, who fashions himself a little dictator within our supposed democracy, is a classic example of how far gone this country’s right wing politics have gone, and why instances like Abu Gharib were not anomalies, but entirely predictable, stemming as they do from our culture. The director of the Arizona ACLU wrote a post explaining what a wretched motherfucker Arpaio is.
His stunts include reinstituting chain gangs (they include women and juveniles), erecting a tent city where over 2,000 convicted men and women serve out their sentences in 120 degree desert heat, feeding prisoners only twice a day (he’s bragged of serving green bologna), and forcing them to wear pink underwear.
Much of the ACLU’s legal docket in Arizona is devoted to challenging Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office (MSCO) policies that violate the constitutional rights of women, prisoners, and immigrants — for starters. Arpaio has spent hundreds of thousands of local taxpayers’ money defending his indefensible and unconstitutional practices.
So, I was gone Friday-Monday, and away from the internet. I was in the city of my birth, El Paso, TX. I occasionally get to go back to my second favorite city in Texas (with Austin being an easy first), though I rarely get to stay long enough to do what I really love doing there, which is hitting downtown and thrift shopping. Still, a little listening and looking, and I got a taste of what life’s been like these past few years there, and how much things have changed while everything continues to look the same.
“Huffington Post has created a computer that generates stories based on click-happy tags.” That was my first thought upon reading 
TPMCafe is having a Book Club for Jessica Valenti’s new book 
Here’s a story I rarely see much about on blogs, even though it seems to me that it goes into the file “Big Fucking Deal”. 
I’ve been saying this for years, and I’m glad that it’s finally catching on as part of the argument for why the federal government should make a huge investment in making American cities more walkable—-
The ACLU Reproductive Rights Project sent a press release to me to alert me that they, in conjunction with other branches of the national organization and with the Arizona branch, are filing three separate cases against