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this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2024
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Can we stop with the conspiracy theories please? This is just stupid.
It's a fact that they have an extremely high false-positive rate. Whether that's intentional or not doesn't change the fact that it serves law enforcement's interests.
I suppose that's true, but that doesn't mean that they don't smell anything. Your conclusion may be correct, but your initial claim isn't, and that's something I'm seeing on lemmy more than I'd like to.
He didn't say they don't smell anything. He said they're trained to respond to their handler. What he said is true. Even if it's not what they're intentionally training, it is a verifiable fact that most k9s respond more to their handlers body language than to any actual substance they're smelling.
Anyways, I wasn't able to find data on police K9 units. I found this which has some good data with references further down the page, but it's pretty far from a field environment. Do you have a study ("verifiable fact") that has this data?
These are two different statements saying different things. Yes, police dogs often have noses that function. No, police dogs often do not require their noses in order to get the response the handler is wanting.
And I was specifically referring to US k9s, but here are polish dogs. Their efficacy in cars, which is what I was referring to although did not explicitly state, is only 57%. Im still looking at other sources to find a more reliable, hopefully first hand, study.
The question wasn't about the efficacy of dogs but about the "only respond to handler" part and you didn't provide a source for that.
Edit: another comment provided a study for that.
https://slrpnk.net/post/13508645/11129816 there have been studies
See my response to that comment
Right- if the dogs alert based on the handler's behavior, they shouldn't be used as probable cause and probably aren't legal to use.
Change in policy and consequences for the police aside.
Yup
I'm a different poster lol
Ah yeah, sorry bout that. Replace "your" with "their" then
They're actually remote-controlled, not real dogs.
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 actuality, 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!