Drug-Sniffing Dogs

[Dave70968]

Excellent article on the use of drug dogs.
http://reason.com/archives/2011/02/21/the-mind-of-a-police-dog/singlepage

Interesting bits:

When we think dogs are using their well-honed noses to sniff out drugs or criminal suspects, they may actually be displaying a more recently evolved trait: an urgent desire to please their masters, coupled with the ability to read their cues.

A recent Chicago Tribune survey of traffic stops by suburban police departments from 2007 to 2009, for example, found that searches turned up contraband in just 44 percent of the cases where police dogs alerted to the presence of narcotics. (An alert is a signal, such as barking or sitting, that dogs are trained to display when they detect the target scent.) In stops involving Hispanic drivers, the dogs' success rate was just 27 percent.

Regarding a controlled test:

The results? Dog/handler teams correctly completed a search with no alerts in just 21 of the 144 walk-throughs. The other 123 searches produced an astounding 225 alerts, every one of them false. Even more interesting, 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). This phenomenon is known as the "Clever Hans effect," after a horse that won fame in the early 1900s by stomping out the answers to simply arithmetic questions with his hoof. Hans was indeed clever, but he couldn't do math. Instead he was reading subtle, unintentional cues from the audience and his trainer, who would tense up as Hans began to click his hoof, then relax once Hans hit the answer. [emphasis mine]

Just a little point of interest for those who believe in impartial drug dogs. I emphasized the word "unintentional" for a reason: this isn't cop-bashing, but rather pointing out that subtle, unintentional cues resulting from psychological preconceptions can render the "impartial" well-trained dog to be a justification for a fishing expedition. (Read the story of Clever Hans for more details; in a slightly different form, it's also why we do double-blind experiments instead of single-blind. Note that Clever Hans's trainer was never thought to have been a deliberate fraud, just unaware of what he was doing.)

So for those who think that everybody who has ever had a dog alert is up to no good, it looks like the statistics say that there's anywhere from a 1-in-2 chance to a 3-in-4 chance that he's perfectly innocent.

Here's the money quote:

The consequences of those mistakes are profound. As my colleague Jacob Sullum has explained, the U.S. Supreme Court says a dog sniff is not invasive enough to qualify as a "search" under the Fourth Amendment, so police do not need a warrant or probable cause to have a dog smell your luggage or your car. At the same time, however, the courts treat an alert by a drug-sniffing dog as probable cause for an actual, no-question-about-it search, the kind that involves going through your pockets, opening your luggage, looking in your trunk, and perusing your personal belongings. The problem is that a dog barking or sitting may be responding not to a smell but to his handler's hunch about a suspect's guilt. The reason we have a Fourth Amendment is precisely to prevent searches based on hunches.

 

[BadgeBunny]

From the article:

"By standard intelligence tests, the dogs have failed...I believe, by contrast, that they have succeeded magnificently. They have applied a novel tool to the task. We are that tool....We solve the puzzles of closed doors and empty water dishes....We humans are brilliant enough to extract hopelessly tangled leashes from around trees.…Dogs are terrific at using humans to solve problems, but not as good at solving problems when we're not around."

Truer words have never been spoken. Dogs are a lot of things but stupid is NOT one of them. Their ability to manipulate those who love them is astounding, to say the least.

 

[beast1989]

i have a problem with cops searching my car randomly but cops do there best at their jobs i generally believe. if a dog hits on my car i dont mind the cop looking through it and proving them wrong when no drugs are found.

If you are legal then its nothing to worry about, so for the average law abiding american its a non-issue.

 

[dennishoddy]

There is a lot of truth to that report. Having trained many dogs to trail, and hunt upland game, I can assure you that a dog can be very intuative to its owners desires.
With nothing but a whistle and wave of the hand, Gunner will come across a field and check out a single bush, and become very excited as he thinks I've seen something. I just know it looks like good cover for a bird, and he responds. The reward of a dog treat for good behavior backs up this behavior.
Their noses and the ability to smell things is unbelievable.
My dog can smell gophers a foot deep in the ground, and digs them up, or trails a pheasant across dry ground.
Drug dogs have smelled drugs hidden in spare tires filled with drugs and perfume to try and hide the drug smell, and so on.
They are amazing animals, but I do agree. They are not always correct.

 

[Dave70968]

i have a problem with cops searching my car randomly but cops do there best at their jobs i generally believe. if a dog hits on my car i dont mind the cop looking through it and proving them wrong when no drugs are found.

If you are legal then its nothing to worry about, so for the average law abiding american its a non-issue.

I think you missed the point of the article. I very specifically didn't say the officers are doing anything less than their best, but rather are unconsciously giving cues to the dogs.

As to "the average law abiding American" having nothing to worry about, read the second quote again: on average, more than half the people on whom a dog alerts are law-abiding; the rate for Hispanics is worse, at almost three quarters. In the controlled test, the dog-handler teams failed at ten times the rate they succeeded.

Even though you may not mind having the police paw through your belongings, it doesn't follow that the rest of us don't. While I'm sure that they're not doing it to get their jollies, and they're doing it because they earnestly suspect that there's evidence of a crime to be found, that doesn't change the fact that such suspicion is manifestly unreasonable in the face of current research.

We get annoyed when the TV weatherman misses a forecast periodically, or when the ref at the football game blows even a single call, but here we have a case where the State (through its agents, the police) is wrong literally more often than it is right as a result of not understanding how its tools work, and we're willing to write it off, along with the infringement upon our Fourth Amendment rights.

 

[yukonjack]

Seriously! Sh*t is fixing to roll down hill with all the uprisings in the Middle East. People don't have jobs. Labor unions are crying like sissy girls. Good bignets can't be found in OKC. The prices of oil is gonna increase in biblical proportions. And you're worried about what a dog might smell in your crotch? People that harp on these useless studies usually do so because they have something to hide.

If I were you I'd concentrate more on getting my food storage ready, cleaning my firearms, changing the filters on my gas mask and making a new tinfoil hat.

 

[vvvvvvv]

People that harp on these useless studies usually do so because they have something to hide.

No. I hate having to put everything back in my vehicle again without help. And that time spent on the side of the road waiting is money lost, and depending on how tight the schedule is, possibly a client lost. That doesn't even get into the reputation hit when someone that knows you (or of you) drives by and sees what's going on. All because of a rather common false positive.

In my old car, I got fished for DUI pretty consistently. All it took was driving west on I-40 through Weatherford. 9 trips out of 10, I'd get stopped if I went by the highway 54 exit around closing time. Half the time, the officer would tell me that they saw me swerving as I pulled out of Cowboys... when I never go to Cowboys and would have no reason to even take an exit through Weatherford.

The day I got my truck, that stopped. And I quit getting random invites to AA.

 

[Dave70968]

And you're worried about what a dog might smell in your crotch? People that harp on these useless studies usually do so because they have something to hide.

Read carefully, yukon: I'm worried about what a dog won't smell, but the officer will still get to go on a fishing expedition because he had an unarticulable hunch when the contact began.

They're called "rights," not "nice-to-haves, when everything else is all hunky-dorey."