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.
Of course K9’s aren’t trained to actually smell anything
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.
Knew a k9 cop. He freely admitted this is how it works.
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.
Good, because that’s absolute bullshit. Especially when it’s legal in Illinois.
That said, don’t drive while high please.
This is the police … if you get pulled over by a jerk of an officer, they’ll find a different excuse to search your vehicle … or at the very least hold you up, get you out of your car and generally give you a hard time.
Do your lights work? How’s your tire treadwear? Is your documentation up to date? You were driving about five over the limit. This is a ride check.
And one of the worst questions I absolutely hate being asked by a cop … “Where are you going?”
Remember, they are asking if they can search your vehicle. You are allowed to say no. Then they must justify an arrest
It’s an imbalance of power.
If a guy with a gun and a license to kill … which is basically what a police officer is … if they start asking questions, I’m answering politely.
I’m not going to argue with them or disagree with them … even if I say ‘no’ I’m still at risk based on the personality of the cop.
I’m also a big brown skinned long haired indigenous person so whenever I get stopped by a cop … I’m doing what I’m told or I risk getting beaten, arrested or even shot.
This is also the reason why I placed four different cameras with audio around my vehicle.
Okay, that is absolutely fair, and I do not blame you one bit for doing what you have to do to stay safe.
Shit I thought that became the case when Illinois passed its recreational law.
Will police have to retire police dogs if they still react to weed?
Yes. Police dogs “alerting” on something that isn’t illegal, in a way that is indistinguishable from “alerting” on something that is illegal, are no longer qualified to be drug sniffers.
That makes it no different than it already is, most of those dogs will “alert” whenever they’re signaled regardless whether they smell anything. Information online suggests anywhere between a 26-44% positive ID rate though numbers on that seem a bit sketchy from different sources.
Hence the quotes around “alert.” I chose to keep my previous comment about accurate dog sniffs in order to address the question of “police dogs that react to weed even though the smell of weed is not illegal.” Inaccurate sniffs are a completely valid, but separate concern.
Drugs won the war!
And just like most wars, it was bullshit that it was fought in the first place and the largest source of casualties was innocents.
They needed some excuse to give hippies felonies so they couldn’t vote
Don’t forget black and brown people. White conservatives hate it when anyone but them participate in democracy
