The dog got a reward when it signaled the presence of drugs. (before an actual search to confirm the dog's signal) That seems like a great way to train a dog to always signal the presence of drugs.
Never mind that the government itself still uses them as part of their security clearance process...
These are concerning false positive rates, but I don't think anything in the article suggests the extent of what the parent wrote, in a universal sense:
>They're basically a rubber-stamp. Dogs want to please their handlers. If the handler wants the dog to alert, the dog will alert. The presence or absence of drugs isn't relevant to the dog.
But yeah, the drug dogs are an end-around of the 4th Amendment.
I agree if a particular dog is wrong more than 10 - 20% of the time, the dog and/or the handler should be taken off of the job. And I agree that they probably shouldn't be allowed to be used by police unless they already have probable cause through some separate means.
If you read the article you will find a description that the dog didn't alert the first time around the car, didn't alert the second time around the car, and only alerted after the cop maliciously signaled to the dog that they want an alert. To me that doesn't sound like a bad dog, it sounds like a bad cop.
26% of searches initiated by a drug dog led to drugs being found.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-2011-01-06-ct-met...
44% here.
The obvious solution is to train the dog to search things that you know have drugs (or don't) because the trainer set it up that way. You'll need to then repeat this training often, and not always in the same environment. If you don't, eventually the dog will figure out that it will always be rewarded for alerting in the field.
The problem with this, of course, is that it's expensive and cumbersome to do. You need to set up cars/bags/lockers/etc with and without drugs in them in a variety of locations, secure them (lest actual criminals steal the drugs), and bring the dogs to them (lots of time out of the handler's day). Also, even if you do this, you'll still get false positives: dogs are living animals, not machines.
dogs are also experts at picking up on non verbal body language and cues, whether you're intentionally giving them off or not.
If we ever make fuzzy happy fun killbot, I think civil rights might be doomed because there'll be an army of killbot fans who will defend them even if they run internally on an API call to random.org
At least that's what happened when I was K9 nonconsent searched.
The dog didn't signal for 4 laps and then the handler looked at him like i look at my dog when he eats cat food. Of course the dog then sat.
When I let him out at night, I give him a treat when he comes back in after doing his business outside.
Then he got smart enough to scratch at the door to go out again, then came right back in and sat by the cabinet to wait for his treat. Finally he gave up on the extra treats when he found it didn't work.
Dogs are very good at figuring out the actions they need to do to get a reward.
A clue to the dog about as subtle as a brick in the face. The best possible good faith interpretation I can give to this is spectacular ignorance in understanding how dogs work.