Policing for Profit: Oklahoma DA halts I-40 drug stops after criticism from judge

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mugsy

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Just another case of Government Contracting gone awry. Government can't manage its own affairs efficiently; what makes its minions think they can manage them second-handedly through a contract? Meh.

The "minions" are focused on one task, not many, and they have a profit motive to succeed. Contractors are actually quite good at accomplishing what they are asked to do. The problem is that they do not have accountability to the public and the only way they can be used in government service - not just policing but really any government task - is with very close oversight and tightly tailored limits to their activities.
 

vvvvvvv

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I havnt seen those studies veg. So I wont comment on their validity. I can only say based on my experience with several properly trained k9's I have not witnessed any similar results.

In a room with no drugs or explosives, the dogs "hit" 85.5% of the time.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/j477277481125291/fulltext.html

They were also twice as likely to hit on the markers intended to fool the handlers than to hit on sausage.


Some "in-the-field" results:

Only 44% turn up a true positive in Chicago, and only 27% when only accounting for Hispanics

Only 25.7% of Illinois State Police dog alerts were true positives, according to their own official documentation

80% false positive rate in Australia

Dog has 100% alert record, only 42% were true positives
Expert's reviews show only a 52% true positive rate (same source as previous link)
 

Foghorn

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Ive seen the last four. They are based on usage records of the handler. The results are skewed in my opinion because you cant say for sure whether or not narcotics had been present in the recent past. Its kinda like coming home and smelling popcorn in your house. Your wife an kids already ate the popcorn so there is no popcorn, but you can still smell popcorn. Ive not seen the other study, but ill read it after work and comment then.
I base my opinion of my dogs accuracy on his results in a controlled training enviroment. When we train, I do not know where or if narcotics are present. I make the call based on his behaviors. We regularly run blanks with no odors present, and utilize cover odors and know associate odors.Odors that are commonly used to cover the odor of narcotics, or things things like tape, cellophane that are commonly used to package narcotics. These are items are never combined with narcotic odors during training. I believe this is called blind testing.
This type of testing in my opinion is the only true test of reliability in a k9\handler team. No matter what it boils down to having a properly trained team and a handler dedicated to doing the job right.
 

Brandi

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When I was a LEO and seeing the inside of a few different departments both in and outside Oklahoma I can say that I was pretty disappointed with what I saw. True, most LEO's I've been around on the job are good people who follow the rules and do it right. However, I've yet to see a department yet, even small ones, that doesn't have officers that seem great on the surface but once they are out on the street it's a totally different story.

Now, most of them are good, decent people who do the job because they actually want to make things better for the good guys. The other LEO's...well they do it because they get off on the power, they believe the badge justifies their actions, they may falsify reports to make charges stick, they may physically assault the suspected bad guy, they just don't care because they know they aren't going to get caught.

I can totally believe, at least some of these non-LEO "trainers", were doing all that crap. It happens all the time all over the place because it is so difficult to weed out that bad ones. One of the biggest reasons is soooo many people who are stopped by the police make fake claims about the officers conduct hoping to get off of their charge. So even the most crystal clean officer is constantly being hit with complaints and so when legitimate complaint comes around they aren't believed and Mr. Crappy Cop goes on his merry way again to do whatever he wants.

They definitely need to hammer these drug corridors though. They need to, IMO, legalize marijuana (even though I don't use it) and take those millions and millions and millions of dollars and put it towards the real problem...other drugs. Stop flooding the jails and prison systems with people who's only crime was smoking pot. Use that space to pack the cells with hard drug criminals that are being nailed because there is all these new funds to fight the problem.
 

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