printI’ve long since maintained that drug-sniffing dogs are looking for bones, not drugs. The sight of a working police dog, nose to the ground, looking for whatever it is that humans think the dog is looking for has always seemed ridiculous to me. Sure, dogs have incredible olfactory abilities. But it’s quite a leap to imagine that a dog’s nose can be reliably harnessed to serve human needs.
What do you know? I was right.
As the Chicago Tribune reports, “state data show the dogs have been wrong more often than they have been right about whether vehicles contain drugs or paraphernalia.
The dogs are trained to dig or sit when they smell drugs, which triggers automobile searches. But a Tribune analysis of three years of data for suburban departments found that only 44 percent of those alerts by the dogs led to the discovery of drugs or paraphernalia. For Hispanic drivers, the success rate was just 27 percent.”
[SNIP; or is it SNIFF]
To make a bad situation worse, sniffer dogs are racist too.
Barry Cooper explains that cops can trigger a false alarm whenever they want to search a suspects car.
The odds are that if the suspects fit the profile, you have a seventy-five to twenty-five chance. When I worked as a probation officer, I knew who’s reefer to check. Most of the time, if I missed the alcohol or drugs, a relative would tell me later where I failed to look. If I had been fortunate enough to have a ‘drug dog’ I could have had an excuse. “The dog didn’t do it.”
Of course dogs are racist. I used to live for two years in a very “diverse” neighbourhood, which made me find out that my terrier dislikes blacks, but also women in Muslim garb, drunks (even though he liked them when sober) and beggars. I SWEAR that is true. In the white middleclass neighbourhood in which we are living for almost two years now, he didn’t bat as much as an eyelid at anybody.