I use a guide dog and when I travel I take along a supply of dog food. twice I’ve been stopped by drug dogs in the airport.  Once, i was with my boss and my bosses boss and had to open my bag and go through my underwear and tampons and what have you in front of them. I always got the impression that the handlers of these dogs knew good and well why the dog targeted me, but just got off on it.

A bit off topic, but there is a theory as to why new guide dog owners have to basically atop their lives and go through hell basically retrining new dogs after they recieve them from sighted trainers. It is that the sighted trainers give them unconscious navigational information that the blind person doesnt. Thisproblem seems to be greatly decreased when the dogs spend significant time training with blind or blindfolded trainers.

I think tjis aspect of dog behavior is well known by dog handlers, and it is a convenient excuse for illegal searches.

Eew, much apologies for tne typos. I need to stop trying to type whole paragraphs on the iphone.

Damn, we can’t trust man’s best friend anymore.

This is why it’s important for the handlers to not know who it is they’re searching.  Human bias can show up even when the tool isn’t an animal.

When I was in the USAF back in the mid ‘70s, my room was searched by a drug dog one Saturday night. 

I had smoked a joint in my room and about 15 minutes later, I heard a scratch at the door.  I ignored it but then when it happened again, I opened the door and was confronted by a Lt from the LE squadron, the dog and handler and a third airman cop.

The Base commander was already on his way so after I refused permission for a room search, we had to wait for him. 

When the search actually took place, the dog alerted on my box of albums where I had spilled a bag of grass a few years before joining the USAF, it alerted on a dresser drawer where I had kept a pipe in the past, and it alerted (according to the handler) on the outside lower right hand pocket of a corduroy sports jacket. 

I’m pretty sure the other cop that was searching with the dog handler actually found my stash since it was in the INSIDE breast pocket of the corduroy jacket.  I explained the alert on the jacket as being because I had kept some smoke in the jacket in pre-USAF days.

So at least, in my case, I was save because the dog handler misinterpreted the dog’s signal and the other cop cut me some slack (I did get high with a lot of cops while in the USAF but did not know this one)

I think this problem could be avoided in, say, the baggage handling section of the airport, where humans are far less likely to be giving off subtle clues about which bags to alert on. That’s where they keep the bomb dogs; out of sight so they don’t freak people out.

But yes, the War on Drugs is stupid.

Actually, the problem is worse than the snippet of Sebastian’s post quoted (correctly) above indicates.  If one goes back to the original Tribune article, it says that failure rates for “alerts” when the driver is Hispanic is 73% vs 56% for all drivers, not 63% vs 56%.

The first thing I think of when I hear something like this is the Reichwing Authoritarian Worshiper’s all purpose, one-size-fits-all, quintessential response when police or government security measures are questioned by one of us dirty hippies on the Left: “if you don’t have anything to hide, you have nothing to worry about!” (Often/usually it’s phrased differently, but the intent is the same…)

The more arbitrary and capricious the process of keeping us “safe” (from drugs, terrorists, boogie men of all sorts) becomes, the more all of us have “something to hide”, when we’re presented as test subjects for some twisted fuck like the infamous “hose ‘em down with pepper spray” asshole cop.

In the end, all this stuff does is either make us inured to our growing police state, and/or force people to drastically change their travel habits to avoid the mistreatment.

Not sure how any of this is supposed to make life better in these United States, but then I also suppose that making life here better was never really the point of it to begin with…

Unless #%@% everybody is carrying these days, the dogs are still doing way better than chance. Which doesn’t excuse the clever hansing, but rather makes it all the more horrific. Because by telling their animals when to alert and when not to, officers are destroying the utility that dogs (including the explosives-sniffing ones) could have.

One some far less crazy planet.

I literally just finished a bar prep session a few minutes ago on Criminal Procedure, including traffic stops with drug dogs under the Terry doctrine (mentioned at the Obsidian Wings post). This is just one more way in which constitutional rights get trampled under the unwinnable drug war. It’s actually unconstitutional to set up checkpoints for “random” car searches in order to gather criminal evidence, as opposed to “random” sobriety tests to ensure road safety. But cops can get around this by using drug dogs to sniff cars whenever they stop someone for minor traffic infractions like driving 26 mph in a 25 mph zone (City of Indianapolis v. Edmond). This was bad enough, but now that there’s evidence of a Clever Hans effect, and there’s the possibility of extending this misinterpretation of the 4th amendment to house searches, it’s even more horrifying. So basically, not only do drug dogs allow cops to perform (otherwise) unconstitutional searches on almost every single car that passes through any given neighborhood, now they have a pretext for searching any home they want as long as they can signal a drug dog into barking at it. I’m not sure which is worse, but the effect of both is not only just systematically criminalizing people of color and the poor, but it’s making a mockery of the Constitution and it’s twisting jurisprudence into all sorts of unsustainable knots in order to fight a war that will only worsen the more its fought.

I’m not yet a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.

There’s an small error in interpretation in the story being quoted that was pointed out in Obsidian Wing’s comments: the errors in the test that were being reported were caused by the human-dog team, not necessarily the dog.

I’ve seen sniffer dogs at work (drugs, bombs, produce), and quite often in a search they’ll pause at a given item or location, might give it a few extra sniffs or play with it a bit, and then move on. When they do get a certain hit, quite often there’s no mistake: they’ll clearly indicate they’ve found something, or tear into it, or whatever. However, it’s those slight pauses where the human error pops in: instead of waiting to see if the dog moves on, the human jumps in.

When the human is training the dog, if the human has placed the training bait, they’ll overlook those pauses and only focus on the real hit.

So it might not be just the Clever Hans effect on the part of the dog, but confirmation bias on the part of the human: they suspect someone, the dog does something that might (but probably doesn’t clearly) indicate a hit, the human moves in.

It doesn’t mitigate the problem, but it doesn’t place the blame entirely on the dog.

I suspect the problem is less acute when the dogs are in situations where there’s a lot of items to search, not much time, and no real reason to select one item over another (say in a warehouse full of boxes, or searching an aircraft with no one in it) because the handler is much more willing to overlook those brief hesitations.

I don’t understand how they can stop someone for going a mile over a speed limit - why not a half mile?  Or a quarter?  Or two hundredths of a mile over a speed limit?  How is that reasonable?

Given the (presumably) low base rate of people carrying drugs, even a failure rate as high as what these dogs are showing is strong evidence that they are doing their jobs (unless you think that half of people are carrying drugs…). Examples like this are the bread-and-butter of demonstrations of Bayes’ theorem - you may test positively for a disease, and yet still it can be more likely than not that you *don’t* have the disease. The problem is not the test; it is the low base rate of disease (or in this case, not very many people carry drugs around where they’re likely to meet police dogs). To compare this to Clever Hans completely unjustified.

That isn’t to say that the dogs aren’t sensitive to multiple sources of information, including cues from their owners that are based on racial bias. But don’t make the mistake of confusing an approximately 50% success rate with failure - that would be a basic probability reasoning error.

@13 richarddmorey: 
The difference between getting tested for a rare desease and getting searched by the police is that the former is voluntary and the latter is involuntary and, for a lot of people, intimidating and humiliating.  Also, most of the time when people carry “drugs” they’re carrying pot for their personal use, which hardly constitutes a threat to society that warrants calling in the dogs.

I don’t understand how they can stop someone for going a mile over a speed limit - why not a half mile?  Or a quarter?  Or two hundredths of a mile over a speed limit?  How is that reasonable?

It’s not reasonable, and they can’t prove it, and you won’t get a speeding ticket for it. But it is used as a reason to pull you over and then the police officer may decide he smells marijuana in your car, or something.

I don’t understand how they can stop someone for going a mile over a speed limit - why not a half mile?  Or a quarter?  Or two hundredths of a mile over a speed limit?  How is that reasonable?

It’s not reasonable, and they can’t prove it, and you won’t get a speeding ticket for it. But it is used as a reason to pull you over and then the police officer may decide he smells marijuana in your car, or something.

Wrong.

I received a ticket for 56 in a 55 zone in South Hill, Virginia (back when the national limit was 55MPH).  I was driving home at the end of spring semester, North Carolina to New Jersey.  It would have cost more to return to fight the ticket than pay the fine, and I am sure the Virginia pigs knew that.

Again, Obama’s shitty conservatism creates space for Libertarians to ply their dishonest and destructive wares.

Ron Paul is on record only being against the Federal War on some Drugs, not any individual state’s decision to tighten or loosen the drug laws per se, so it’s unclear how this would change under him, because many drug busts are made on the state level.

Which means any Paul supporter who claims he would end the War on some Drugs is either disingenuous or an idiot.

Which one are you, LIbertarian?

@richardmorey #13 - Yes, the false positive rate isn’t actually that revealing, as you say. But did you click through and read the experiment they did to test whether there was any signaling by the trainer? That’s where they are getting the Clever Hans conclusion from.

Richard, that assumes, incorrectly, that the police are searching entirely at random. They’re not. They’re searching people that probably are more likely to be carrying: young people, people who are clearly partying, etc. There’s already a filtering system in place. I think that any of us, without having a cop’s experience, could probably narrow down the field of people to search to get a 30% hit rate within that group of people who are carrying. So, I’m not buying.

Liberatarian, you’re just arguing with a strawman. Liberals have never—-not once—-just stood up for “more government”, without regard to what it does. Never. Not once. Liberalism has always—-always—-been a combination of support for civil liberties, social spending, and economic regulations to make life better for everyone. Liberals stand for good government. I know that makes your tiny, simplistic brain hurt, but alas, the real world is a complex place and needs a complex approach.

Sheesh, the ACLU is always lambasted by wingnuts for its liberalism. They actually do get it, even when they pretend they don’t.

@ Albert Cirrus @3 - Sure we can trust them.  To be man’s best friend.  That’s the whole problem, really.

Of course, the standard libertarian bullshit about how “most government programs don’t achieve their goals” is utterly belied by the stable existence of the United States and several dozen other modern democratic states as fiscally secure entities that continue to collect revenue, administer social programs, provide for the education, public safety and health of the majority of their citizens in a reasonably effective way and occasionally effect massive feats of engineering and technological prowess such as (oh, for example) sending humans to the moon, or assisting private companies in launching telecommunications devices into geosynchronous orbit, or developing an electronic communications network that would ultimately transform global cultures and economies.

Yeah, those governments never get anything done. Except for providing the kind of stable and secure environment where successful private enterprise can exist, I guess.

There will always be examples of government failure, duh. Maybe you should try rereading Amanda’s post, not that it will sink in - liberals are about promoting good government. There are way too many places where it isn’t good enough to list, but your bullshit about how government has somehow failed us as a human invention doesn’t hold up to any scrutiny at all.

Liberals LOVE BIG gov’t.  You always want more.  Except for defense - keeping that BIG BIG BIG is the Repub’s job.

Yes, that would seem to have something to do with this sentence from Amanda:

Liberals have never—-not once—-just stood up for “more government”, without regard to what it does.

If you want to claim that liberals just like big government, you might try making that argument without undermining it by saying “except for the things that you don’t want to be big.” The idea that liberals might have substantive reasons to support better social programs and effective government institutions while opposing those that are dangerous to peace and civil liberties, such as an enormous military and ineffective law enforcement activity in the War On Drugs and excessive security screening at airports is apparently far too complicated for the libertarian brain, since attempts to slam this very simple concept through libertarian heads is a standard feature of arguments with them.

But “Liberals love big government over all else” is easy to say, and learning new ideas is SO HARD, so I expect you’ll continue to stick with it.

When my son was in the Air Force, a drug-sniffing dog was brought through the dorm at irregular intervals.  On one occasion, as my son’s room was being sniffed, the dog fixed on the closet and when the door was opened, went right for the room-mate’s dirty-clothes bag.  So the searchers dumped it out and went through it (all those stinky adolescent-guy socks, eww) and found at the bottom—- a box of chocolate chip cookies the roomie’s mother had sent him.

My son has remained dubious about the accuracy of drug-sniffing dogs.

@27 If he was still in basic training, the cookies might have actually been contraband, and the dogs may have been trained to sniff out any foodstuffs in rooms. I mean, why had the roommate hidden them in such a place? So, in this case, maybe the dog was accurate. Not that it makes the idea of drug-sniffing dogs a good one. When my nephew was in basic training, all sorts of things were forbidden. My sister-in-law, not knowing this, sent him some fancy mail-order cookies and they were confiscated before he ever got them.

Yes, they should stop using dogs this way, but good luck with the project of trying to stop it. The contraband-sniffing dog industry is just one more deeply entrenched lobbying interest now. Even if this study gets any attention beyond the niche blogosphere, which is unlikely, there would be massive backlash. The myth is pervasive. All that media coverage of the amazing demonstrations with the adorable dogs and the dashing cops in their SWAT outfits (damn, he looks hot in that tight uniform and those boots ... erm, well anyway). They’re not going to run stories saying it was all bullshit after all.

I have pointed out for years on blog comments how the dogs could be picking up on the handlers’ desire to search and have been met with wounded indignation that I would even suggest that a sworn officer of the law could stoop to such cheating. Which is of course not the point; it could be completely subconscious—dogs do have a marvelous sense of smell but are also near-psychic in their ability to pick up on what their person wants. Or, the cop might cheat (shocking thought I know) with a signal, too, or just say the dog “indicated” when it didn’t. Who’s going to know? The drug-smelling myth is so ingrained that some people can freak out at the sight of an untrained dog, just being there with a cop, and give themselves away.

I’m slightly biased, because I love the dogs at the airport.  You’re all stressed, you just went through customs, and you’re waiting for your luggage, and a cute little beagle comes waddling around!  It makes me happy. 

That said, some of this seems like a problem that could be solved by better training and procedures, much like reforming line-up procedures to eliminate confirmation bias errors.  Presumably, the dogs are picking up on unconscious signals from their handler, or the handlers are interpreting non-alerts as alerts based on their own perceptions.  One solution might be to ensure that the handler does not know who the suspect is, as well as training the handler not to react too early to potential alerts.  Video recording the search, preserving evidence of what constituted an “alert,” might also help—you could compare what the handler saw with the dog’s alert under controlled conditions (it would also allow the suspect to see the search without being so close as to affect the handler’s perceptions).  It would also be important to document the false positives of dog sniffs and present that evidence to courts, such that a dog sniff would no longer be considered reliable enough to justify a search without more evidence. 

In the absence of such reforms, however, using dogs to sniff for drugs in cases where the suspect or owner of the luggage has already been identified (such as searches of airport luggage) does seem to be extremely problematic.  And using them during random traffic stops is way over the line, in any case.  Random traffic stops or checkpoints can generally only be used to identify people driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs (with certain exceptions, of course).  Turning every traffic stop into a drug search is just not okay.

I had a comment on artdyke @ 6 a couple of hours ago, but the site crashed/went into maintenance (or so my browser said) and it got eaten.

I think this problem could be avoided in, say, the baggage handling section of the airport, where humans are far less likely to be giving off subtle clues about which bags to alert on. That’s where they keep the bomb dogs; out of sight so they don’t freak people out.

Having worked in and traveled through airports a lot over the last 15 years or so, I can tell you that this is the way customs used to do it in many places, and still did fairly recently IME.  Customs and immigration at BOS logan had a freindly little beagle who checked baggage waiting to be picked up for Agricultural products and a lab for something, though I never say her hit on anything.  They now have a black lab that is sometimes in the terminal, but my trips through Customs have been at EWR, Detroit, SFO and JFK since around ‘05, so I don’t know if that is current.  Narita Airport in Japan has a couple of black labs who are in the international baggage claim area, both bagges only and people with their bags, several years ago and last year when I was there, but not the times between.
At EWR in November, a guy was running a shepherd up and down the bridge from the terminal to the airplane and either did not have control of the dog or was signaling for it to lunge; I don’t know which.  That was definately not the area to have a dog anyway, but certainly not be handling it in that manner.  Clearly, the problem is the handler and the airport, Customs or law enforcement entity, not the dogs themselves, and most can easily be mitigated by processes that separate the people and dogs from direct interaction.
I have no personnal experience with police dogs, and so can’t comment.

Libertarian -  Since we print our own money, and it is really nothing but a promisary note, we actually can’t go broke unless someone wants to forclose on the actual physical country.  Good luck to them on that.  Problem is that so many other monitary systems use the USD as a basis that doing so would spin global enonomics around on the rollercoaster yet again.

Aww, Libertarian is advocating anarchy! That’s so cute. I just want to pinch his wittle cheeks.

“How many more years do you think this “stable existence” will continue while we borrow 40% of what we spend annually have de facto 20% unemployment because the John Galtoid Wizards of Wall Street refuse to do anything about it, leaving it up to the Government to step in?  Yes, we’ll be stable right up until we have riots in the streets.”

You’re absolutely right we’ll have riots in the street if this situation doesn’t stop.  But it won’t be the deficit that makes people riot, it will be their cold and hungry children, who are cold and hungry because mom/dad can’t get a job and the social safety net is in tatters because the 1% want even more than they already have.

People who get to the “I have nothing to lose, things can’t get much worse for me and my family” stage are the people who riot.  The deficit is a political invention, and nothing more than abstraction to most Americans.  (I’m not saying that it isn’t a problem, but priorities first: A patient having a heart attack and cancer coming in to an ER gets treated for the heart attack first, whether it makes the cancer worse for a short while or not.)  People who (as Charles Pierce says) “Got no jobs; Got no money” don’t give a good goddam about an abstract like the deficit — they need food and shelter now.

(You know the deficit is not really considered to be a big problem among the political people, because they only complain about it — going back to Truman — when Democrats are in office.  When Bush Jr. was in there, the mantra was “Reagan proved deficits don’t matter”, or have you forgotten?)

I’m not looking forward to a day when corporate CEOs, Wall Street casino operators, and anyone with a net worth of any significance are hanging from telephone poles across America, but it’s a fairly safe prediction that we’re headed that way if things don’t change, and it’ll be lack of jobs, not the deficit driving the anarchy…

Idiots like Libertarian somehow have this ridiculous idea that somehow if government was eliminated the Libertarian/Objectivist Fairy would swoop down and bless us with Freedom! and Liberty! and Great Economic Success for All Who are Willing to Work Hard!  And then birds would sing, bunnies would frolic in green meadows, crickets would chirp, and all would be well with the world.  Get real!

Somehow the natural tendencies of human beings toward greed and exploitation, hatred and evil, selfishness and vice, will all be transformed — from weaknesses that have plagued the human race forever — into virtues that will bring about a paradise on earth.

And you morons have the nerve to call Karl Marx naive with his idea that The State would “just wither away” in the wake of a somehow perfect and egalitarian Communism?

Government is a reality.  When any more than a handful of people live together or otherwise cooperate on something, someone will become leader (either by being appointed by the rest, or siezing power over the desires of the rest).  The more people who must be organized, the more organizers are needed, the more organized the leadership must become, and the “government” becomes bigger.

True for corporations, true for military units, true for sports teams, as well as true for cities, true for states, true for nations.  The argument is not, and cannot, be whether we will have government — that is a given.  The argument comes down to what kind of government we will have, and how effective that government is versus how intrusive it must be to be effective.

Just as business will tend toward monopoly if given the “freedom” to do so (in other words, if they are not restrained by laws and subject to refereeing by some government), governments themselves tend toward police states — governed either by dictators/kings/emperors/“dear leaders”/“gods” or committees that will claim democratic authorization from “The People” but bear little to no actual signs of genuine representation of citizens and their needs/desires.

These tendencies, both in business and in government, must be constantly struggled against.
 
The basic difference between a libertarian and a liberal, is the libertarian thinks greed and selfishness are qualities that should be celebrated and unrestrained in any fashion, regardless of the cost to the rest of the citizens of a nation.  A liberal accepts that greed and selfishness are qualities of human beings (whether for good or bad or some combination), but they cannot remain unchecked if a civil society is desired outcome.  It’s pretty much as simple as that…

Kit-Kat, I think those beagles in the airport are sniffing for contraband food, .it drugs:

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beagle_Brigade

Which as the owner of two Beagle/Basset Hounds, I can tell you from experience that they are probably very qualified to do. I just hope they let them eat some of what they find.

That explains why I saw a beagle alert to a ham sandwich.  Which was also absurdly cute.

How many more years do you think this “stable existence” will continue while we borrow 40% of what we spend annually?

Another “libertarian” trotting out standard Republican talking points in defense of his blinding yearning to be owned outright by a corporation.

there is a PBS documentary on netflix streaming called “in the eye of a dog.”  its about canine assistants, but in one point a trainer talks about how those dogs (lab/golden/poodle of various degrees) can get so tuned into the signals and desires of their trainer and later their owners that they will be able to follow the commands and signals of people even with very extreme limitations - quadriplegics, limited speech, or even catch the signs of a seizure coming on.  if dogs can do this work (for good) what’s to stop them from picking up very subtle signs from handlers and it being used for evil, so to speak.

Good point about the humans giving signals to the dogs!

That’s why we’re so excited about a soon to be tested breakthrough in e-Nose technolgy. We’re very close to achieving dog nose level sensitivity to a number of chemical compounds of interest. Not nearly as broad as a dog can do, but for specific substances, good enough! We’ll soon have a hand held sniffer that will
eliminate the problem of influencing the dog. Should be ready for broad scale testing by early 2013.

HELOOOOOOOO GROLBY !
[Fantasy libertarian economics follow]

Part of the problem I have with taking libertarians seriously is the made-up, end-of-the-world baloney economics that they use to prop up their bullshit arguments. But state debt and national borrowing is not like a mortgage that you take out on your home, and it is not like the loans I took out to go to college. To argue otherwise is literally to argue that reality is wrong, and the fact that politicians all over the world are making policy based on these fantastic currency-zone-as-family economic beliefs is a major part of why we are in such big trouble right now. The liberal government solution of MORE spending and MORE borrowing is in fact what should have been done. It’s by listening to wackaloons like you that governments the world over have managed to make things even worse. We can in fact remain stable and secure while borrowing a lot more than 40% of what we spend annually - something the United Kingdom has done intermittently but regularly for almost two centuries.

Next you’re going to start bleating the tired old scare story about how China’s stake in the U.S. national debt gives them equity in ownership of the United States. That’s usually the next made-up bullshit that the libertarians I know go to.

Libertarian, as for your tutoring moi,  you need to display a learning curve first:

He believes the constitution says such issues should be left to the states to decide, and if a state chooses to legalize marijuana, cocaine, heroin and/or prostitution, so be it.

If we elect Ron Paul, all drug dogs will be beagles, because of the cutest finger on the invisible hand.

This also explains why these dogs never show any interest in myself or my husband, even though we have, from time to time, smoked near where we store our suitcases.  We aren’t “suspect”.

“If we elect Ron Paul, all drug dogs will be beagles, because of the cutest finger on the invisible hand.”

...because beagles are cute, we won’t feel the sting of our missing civil rights as much as we would if they were instead german shepherds, or other stereotypical dogs favored by police.  Image is reality…

Libertarian, the word “libertarian” once solely meant socialist libertarian, i.e.: left anarchist. I’ve yet to see you come out with any good argument for why right libertarianism is superior to left libertarianism, even if we accept the premise that all government is bad government. Left libertarianism has all the benefits of ending the drug laws and wars, plus the benefit of championing small community organization and sharing of resources over just letting corporations take over the same role that big government previously had.

ahem:

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.

To review, a method, which is being used for screening and to establish probable cause for actual legal cases, has a success rate of about 44%.
The Polygraph was another method, which was, at one point, used for screening and establishing probable cause, but was discontinued and deemed inadmissible in court for being NOTORIOUSLY UNRELIABLE. With its success rate at about 39%.

This is not a good thing. This is a very bad thing.

You may now return to your regularly scheduled programming of addressing the Libertarian troll and having him ignore everything meaningful you say.

You may now return to your regularly scheduled programming of addressing the Libertarian troll and having him ignore everything meaningful you say.

Sorry man we didn’t realize we were ignoring you.

We can pay attention to you now if you want us to.

LIbertarian, do you enjoy lying about what liberals actually want? Or do you really believe that shit?

How many of these dogs work for local police forces vs. in airports or at border crossings?

The reason I ask is about 99% of the “sniffers” I’ve seen work in the secondary category, and in those positions they don’t need the dogs as an excuse to rifle through your things. Border and airport searches are places we lost any form of civil liberties long ago under guise of safety.

I joke that I won’t travel with my partner anymore because he falls under that category of “big scary man.” They just need to look at him and *boom* our luggage is being pulled apart for a “random” check (I guess as in, it randomly happens, all the time.) If we drive across the US border as well, last few times I’ve seen the German Shepherds out, they’ve never come near “our” vehicle, but we’re hauled off to the side so they can search the car, everytime. I’m just glad they haven’t had the itch to pull any side panels off yet.

I was going somewhere with this… Ah yes, wondering if there is a difference in false positive rates when the handler doesn’t need an indication to actually search anyone suspicious. Also if they are going to violate my rights against unreasonable search anyways… dogs are adorkable.

The Polygraph was another method, which was, at one point, used for screening and establishing probable cause, but was discontinued and deemed inadmissible in court for being NOTORIOUSLY UNRELIABLE. With its success rate at about 39%.

Except that the Polygraph is still used as an investigational technique ALL THE TIME. The dogs are just an technique for investigation, not court evidence.

Except that the Polygraph is still used as an investigational technique ALL THE TIME. The dogs are just an technique for investigation, not court evidence.

People can’t be forced to take a polygraph.

Because by telling their animals when to alert and when not to, officers are destroying the utility that dogs (including the explosives-sniffing ones) could have.

I agree with the argument against drug-dogs, but I’m not sure this applies to explosive-sniffing dogs in baggage handling areas of airports or in USPS/Fedex/UPS package handling facilities, namely because how does the dog handler known which bags to single out, most likely never having seen the owner of said bags?

It’s not meaningful to talk about what Libertarians, or any form of conservatives, “believe,” as versus what they “want.”  Unexamined people believe the things that will allow them to get the things they want.  There’s no differentiation between “true” and “useful.”

I’m late, but you might enjoy? this story from the not so great state of Georgia here:

http://daily-tribune.com/view/full_story/17003268/article-K-9s-search-two-Bartow-schools?instance=main_article

We train our young to be “comfortable” with a fascist police state early on.

People can’t be forced to take a polygraph.

That’s true, nor can you be forced to submit to a search, but as soon as a dog is brought into the picture, generally people acquiesce.  I don’t want to say it’s a show of force, but the dog and the polygraph both up the ante, and most people submit because the next step is, “Well, why wouldn’t you if you have nothing to hide?”

I agree with the argument against drug-dogs, but I’m not sure this applies to explosive-sniffing dogs in baggage handling areas of airports or in USPS/Fedex/UPS package handling facilities, namely because how does the dog handler known which bags to single out, most likely never having seen the owner of said bags?

The problem is, as this article points out, that dogs are being used to expand searches to homes, which used to be pretty much sacrosanct.  Police have more latitude to search a vehicle subsequent to a traffic violation than they do to just randomly search your house.  In the case in question, drug dogs alerted on a house, which led to an arrest for marijuana.  The question is, firstly, should the ability for the state to search your house be expanded, and if so, should it be expanded in order to allow a questionable practice be used for probable cause for a search.

The better question is, if the dog alerts wrongly, does the handler assume the dog made a mistake, or is the burden on the suspect to prove the drugs were never there?

With all of the sciencey forensics we are used to seeing on TV, we assume that our justice system is about finding “truth.”  I don’t think it is, exactly.  If it was, we wouldn’t rely on juries.  The element of “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” is a lot stronger than I wish it were.  In many states, factual innocence isn’t a condition for post-conviction relief.

“With all of the sciencey forensics we are used to seeing on TV, we assume that our justice system is about finding “truth.””

...which makes us yet another generation of Americans who have a fundamental misunderstanding of our “justice system”.

We have an adversarial system, where winning is equated/confused with finding the truth.  Often the truth is discovered, but that is merely a nice side-effect, and not something the system can guarantee. 

In reality, as has been demonstrated countless times across the country, especially in big cases, but often small ones as well, the side with the most legal firepower (money?) wins, and it’s assumed the truth has been revealed — only to find out later that the actual truth was very different, and an innocent person was convicted and sentenced (or in Texas executed), or an evil was allowed to go unpunished…

<blockquote>People can’t be forced to take a polygraph.

That’s true, nor can you be forced to submit to a search, but as soon as a dog is brought into the picture, generally people acquiesce.  I don’t want to say it’s a show of force, but the dog and the polygraph both up the ante, and most people submit because the next step is, “Well, why wouldn’t you if you have nothing to hide?”</blockquote>

They can have dogs sniff out their “probable cause” without your permission, but this comes right down to the fact that the courts have decided that you simply have fewer rights in your vehicle when it come to search and seizure.

And again they don’t really need the dogs. A cop can cite a variety of suspicious activity as probable cause to search a vehicle. The standard of proof needed is much lower than say, a home. The rules of traffic stops are very much weighted in favour of law enforcement.

Also many individuals on parole and previous sex offenders are required to take polygraphs in many jurisdictions.

Arg, sorry about the double blockquote fail there.

How many of these dogs work for local police forces vs. in airports or at border crossings?

The reason I ask is about 99% of the “sniffers” I’ve seen work in the secondary category, and in those positions they don’t need the dogs as an excuse to rifle through your things. Border and airport searches are places we lost any form of civil liberties long ago under guise of safety.
Comment #51: hypatia on 01/07 at 01:24 AM

They need it as a layer of plausible deniability that they are selecting people and luggage to examine based on race or religion or other protected status.  Hey, looks like we were *right* that Black and Brown people are the druggies!  The dogs prove it!

The racist father of a friend of mine had “racist” dogs.  They’d bark and leap and slaver but only at Black people.  Even if the dad wasn’t home.  So don’t tell me dogs can’t learn race.

nor can you be forced to submit to a search

You can be forced to acquiesce to having your car dog-sniffed.

Unexamined people believe the things that will allow them to get the things they want.  There’s no differentiation between “true” and “useful.”

Or between “true” and “lets me sleep at night,” for the more earnest among them.

@ Treefinger

Libertarian, the word “libertarian” once solely meant socialist libertarian, i.e.: left anarchist. I’ve yet to see you come out with any good argument for why right libertarianism is superior to left libertarianism, even if we accept the premise that all government is bad government. Left libertarianism has all the benefits of ending the drug laws and wars, plus the benefit of championing small community organization and sharing of resources over just letting corporations take over the same role that big government previously had.

Right libertarians don’t believe that they themselves or people as a group can lead themselves. They’re authoritarians, who either need to be the top do or be led. The only hierarchy they can work with is a vertical one, instead of any lateral system.

While we are at it, we could bring up the inconvenient truth that urinalysis has a really huge failure rate.
Want to know how big the failure rate is?  Just ask any police officer, lab technician or registered nurse.  The nervous laughter which will be their only response will be extremely eloquent.

I have to wonder how it has escaped Libertarian’s notice that the cause of the financial crisis was deregulation of financial markets.  Tell us again how less government regulation is a good thing.

“I have to wonder how it has escaped Libertarian’s notice that the cause of the financial crisis was deregulation of financial markets.  Tell us again how less government regulation is a good thing.”

...but you don’t understand.  Even though financial regulations were gutted, some still remained.  And if there’s anything we know for certain about the Libertarian Prosperity Fairy, if there are any regulations on anything she will go somewhere else.  Same for taxes — they must be 0% for the 1% or else. (Tax rates for the 99%?  She don’t care, confiscate everything from the looters and moochers…)

You can’t be a “cafeteria regulator”:  Either you regulate, in which case your country is doomed to socialofascist mooslim hell, or you remove all regulations on everything and acheive the same sort of success other deregulated societies (like Somalia) have had…

War is Peace, Peace is War! Etc etc

Should there be a new rule of the internet that any political discussion will tend inevitably towards a quote from 1984?  Even one that starts as a discussion of drugs dogs?  Oops.

What do you mean “even”?  Of course a discussion that starts with over-reach of government into civil liberties and unreasonable searches is going to eventually lead to 1984.

#63 I think the jurisprudence there is the OUTSIDE of your car isn’t necessarily a search, but if you read my entire comment, the dog being brought in, regardless of whether they let it sniff around the outside of the car or not, changes the dynamic and forces acquiescence.  Either that or the dog makes a “hit,” and now they get to search your car ANYWAY, even if you are aware of your rights and don’t give in to the pressure.

Actually, more correct would be 1984 or Them, except not enough people have read Them.

These dogs are meant to intimidate.

I was searched by a handler and his dog on a flight from London to NY.  The dog was huge, bigger than me by far.  What struck me was how angry it seemed.  All of its natural instincts to connect with human beings had been forced out of it.

It stood by me for a long time then moved on.  The dog and its handler did pull aside a Middle Eastern man.  The dog just sat on him.  The man looked understandably terrified.  He was made to reveal that he had a huge money belt hidden under his shirt, probably all his worldly wealth strapped to his person.  He had to give his paperwork and IDs before they even let him get on to a plane.

Was this man picked on because he was foreign?  Most likely.

I do a lot of baggage handling at a border crossing, and all of the comments to the effect of “well it’s okay if they’re doing it away from the people so they can’t stereotype them” made me think… is even that free of bias?  Cause I see a lot of bags, and after a while it gets so that you can tell a surprising amount about people from them.  Often people’s bags will give you a feel for their age or country of origin, but probably the biggest indicator is class.  When I think about the bags that are more likely to get labeled as “suspicious” by us (we don’t screen them or anything, just observations) it has a lot to do with how much the owner spent on them.  A family’s set of shiny, new, matching luggage isn’t going to come off as suspicious to anybody, whereas an old battered shapeless bag that’s all patched up or has things sticking out of it because the zippers are broken just come off as super suspicious.  Once again, we don’t screen the luggage, but I really doubt whatever training the border police get can overcome that kind of gut reaction.  That’s just the mental image people get when they think “suspicious bag.”  But in reality it just comes down to who travels enough/can afford to invest in nice, handsome luggage, and who had to make do with whatever they had around.

As I said I have no idea how big a role this might play, but while we were talking about subtle bias I wanted to point out that you definitely CAN profile someone from their bag alone.

Not that I have that much respect for the screening “processes” of the customs agents.  We hang around customs and we can watch them work.  Some agents are good about seeming to search at random, some go for the scuzzy folks…. and then there are the two who always, and exclusively, rifle through every nook and cranny of the luggage of every attractive young lady who is sent to them.  Yech.

Love this article!  In training scent dogs good practice is to do double blinded trials.  As pointed out, though, there is a question of whether such training (assuming it is successful) transfers to the field, and whether in a practical sense the process could ever be free of officer bias.  Unless a process can be perfected to reduce the bias to an acceptable level, scent dogs should not be doing this kind of work!  There also have to be consequences for false positives, otherwise there is no incentive for law enforcement to improve.

I love how if a search turns up no drugs, it is justified by saying that the suspect must have just had some lingering residue that threw the dog off.  There are so many problems with this argument, not least of which is that it gives these dog teams absolute power, because they are never wrong! 

By the way, dogs are capable of distinguishing between a residue and a stronger scent, so that is no excuse for false positives.