“The laws on cannabis have changed in such a drastic way as to render the smell of burnt cannabis, standing alone, insufficient to provide probable cause for a police officer to search a vehicle wi…
That’s good. The article talks about how K9’s should be handled with the legalization of weed. Should they be retired if they still respond to weed, etc.
Of course K9’s aren’t trained to actually smell anything. They’re just trained to respond to an officers command, giving police the freedom to search any vehicle they please.
There was a study done where police K9 units where told they’d be testing the accuracy of the dog’s ability to find drugs. In actually, they were testing the handlers. Handlers were told drugs were hidden in a certain location, but there wasn’t actually drugs there. Despite that, all their dogs alerted several times to the location the handlers were told about.
I’ve looked at several of these studies today and they all prove without a doubt that handlers have an effect on their dogs’ behavior, but they don’t prove that the dogs don’t have the ability to detect what they say they can. That might become useless policy-wise if the police can nearly always cause the dog to alert, but science-wise it’s dishonest to say that the dogs can’t smell anything.
I don’t think the dogs’ ability to smell things is in question, but the ability of humans to reliably use that sense of smell and not inadvertently get the dogs to respond to an accidental or deliberate signal from their handler.
Ultimately, the dogs want to please their human, not sniff out drugs, and if police are looking for some pretext to search a car, then signaling with or without drugs will please the human.
Dogs should only be used once a warrant is issued to help speed up a search. At which point, if they aren’t good at it, they’ll eventually just stop using them. If they can be used to bypass warrants entirely, then that is their usefulness, not how good they are at finding drugs or not signaling when there isn’t anything to be found.
That’s good. The article talks about how K9’s should be handled with the legalization of weed. Should they be retired if they still respond to weed, etc.
Of course K9’s aren’t trained to actually smell anything. They’re just trained to respond to an officers command, giving police the freedom to search any vehicle they please.
Can we stop with the conspiracy theories please? This is just stupid.
There was a study done where police K9 units where told they’d be testing the accuracy of the dog’s ability to find drugs. In actually, they were testing the handlers. Handlers were told drugs were hidden in a certain location, but there wasn’t actually drugs there. Despite that, all their dogs alerted several times to the location the handlers were told about.
I’ve looked at several of these studies today and they all prove without a doubt that handlers have an effect on their dogs’ behavior, but they don’t prove that the dogs don’t have the ability to detect what they say they can. That might become useless policy-wise if the police can nearly always cause the dog to alert, but science-wise it’s dishonest to say that the dogs can’t smell anything.
I don’t think the dogs’ ability to smell things is in question, but the ability of humans to reliably use that sense of smell and not inadvertently get the dogs to respond to an accidental or deliberate signal from their handler.
Ultimately, the dogs want to please their human, not sniff out drugs, and if police are looking for some pretext to search a car, then signaling with or without drugs will please the human.
Dogs should only be used once a warrant is issued to help speed up a search. At which point, if they aren’t good at it, they’ll eventually just stop using them. If they can be used to bypass warrants entirely, then that is their usefulness, not how good they are at finding drugs or not signaling when there isn’t anything to be found.
Knew a k9 cop. He freely admitted this is how it works.
No, you’re right. I do believe they’re trained to detect things, and thought about editing it, but I stuck with the poor wording.
I appreciate this, apologies for sounding a bit hostile
They are trained for it. That doesn’t mean they can do it well.
Hey you’ve just described my work, too!