By the way, there is an excellent film called Rebel Ridge now on Netflix where the basic premise is about small town police abusing the practice of civil asset forfeiture.
If that comforts you (I know it doesn't) Swiss police can take any money claiming it touched cocaine so it was maaayyyybe used in trafficking. Stats say about 90% of banknotes qualify so it's a sure shot for them. Even if you're cleared of the accusations, they will STILL keep your money.
It's been recommending that movie to me, and it looks excellent, but I know if I watch it it's gonna end up with me throwing the TV out the window out of rage.
I know it's just a figure of speech, but I'd also like to add a reminder if someone needs to see it: channeling that same rage into investing time and effort into making a change is the very reason why such an enraging show is made and why it should be watched. Just raging into the wind is pointless, specially after choosing not to invest anything into making a change
If this were the case, would someone not have challenged it in court by now? If the dogs and their handlers were challenged in a controlled trial and shown to be biased, that would make for a useful test case.
"Handlers were falsely told that two conditions contained a paper marking scent location (human influence). Two conditions contained decoy scents (food/toy) to encourage dog interest in a false location (dog influence). Conditions were (1) control; (2) paper marker; (3) decoy scent; and (4) paper marker at decoy scent. No conditions contained drug or explosive scent; any alerting response was incorrect. A repeated measures analysis of variance was used with search condition as the independent variable and number of alerts as the dependent variable. Additional nonparametric tests compared human and dog influence. There were 225 incorrect responses, with no differences in mean responses across conditions"
"To test this, we influenced handler beliefs and evaluated subsequent handler/dog team performance according to handler-identified alerts. The overwhelming number of incorrect alerts identified across conditions confirms that handler beliefs affect performance."
The FBI spent 4 decades grossly lying about their ability to analyze hair. Think about that. The charade actually went on so long that some people would have lived their entire adult life, their entire career lying their asses off. It was later found that at least 90% of cases contained errors.
During this time someone could have similarly proved that it wasn't so because were it so surely someone could have challenged it.
An alternative explanation is that forensic science or indeed any sort of science as practiced by law enforcement has always been a joke and the bar to do something about it is always very very high.
The cost of challenging anything is often prohibitively expensive both in terms of legal costs and in risk of drawing a sentence several times worse than a plea and any case which might result in police losing a valuable tool can be mooted by simply dropping that particular case after that high bar is met.
Remember also that the prosecution and the judge aren't scientists but ARE colleagues. Perceptively evidence from dogs are brought only when they actually find something so even if they don't provably always "work" in the scientific sense they perceptively help them nail bad guys. The idea that the judge would be liable to remove that useful tool because it didn't pass scientific muster is both optimistic and naive.
Police science is a parallel world of non-science. Over and over, fake science like hair id, bite mark analysis, fire, shaken baby, excited delirium, and others are debunked. But the courts have been terribly uninterested in hearing science contradict police-science.
To be clear: courts have their own way of deciding disputes, and that process has distinct differences from the scientific model. E.g. stare decisis is actively hostile to new evidence; appeals may not reference new evidence; police practices are given deference as experts in their own magisterium, and may not be held to normal scientific practice; and others.
To do that, dog should be handled by someone who is not their regular police handler. Then they would claim he doesn't know how to handle the dog properly, or doesn't have the required "soul bond" with the animal. Can't win against crooks.
> To do that, dog should be handled by someone who is not their regular police handler.
Not necessarily if the experiment is double blind. (Or tripple blind I guess because it is the dog, the handler and the on-site experimenter who are not aware of where the samples are hidden.)
I hadn't heard of this before, but here are some sources. Note this quote from [2], U.S. Customs and Border Protection:
"Canines are taught to detect concealed U.S. currency and firearms. Both the Officer/Agent and canine are taught the proper search sequences when searching vehicles, aircraft, freight, luggage, mail, passengers and premises."
I have no idea what the ratio of scientific backing vs. security theater is, though.
> I have no idea what the ratio of scientific backing vs. security theater is, though.
Yes, dogs give you a convenient excuse to produce 'probable cause' in order to authorise a search whenever you feel like it, because the signs the dogs give are interpreted by their handlers.
Cannot find the story now but there was situation where they sentenced woman for drug possession ONLY because dog indicated so, but they found no drugs on her or in her car.
Do you happen to remember if she was sentenced because she was convicted by a jury? I have very little faith in the U.S. justice system so I guess that wouldn’t surprise me, but it feels likelier that they used the K9 “evidence” to coerce her into accepting a plea bargain (which, to be clear, is also bad).
During a three-week period, fishermen fooled the Nazis and police dogs who
searched their ships – lacing handkerchiefs with a mixture of rabbit blood and
cocaine, in order to fool the dogs.
That kind of seems like the mixture of rabbit blood and cocaine overwhelms other scents?
The government has always been a violent gang that steals people's labor and property by force, and says that's okay because they wrote on some pieces of paper that they are allowed to do that.
But when I point that out I'm the delusional extremist.
For what it's worth, I agree with you.
After all, none of us living in "democracies" were ever given a chance to vote about the legitimacy of the constitution, of the law codes, of the armed thugs, of the state itself...
I don't know that a system with no government or voluntarily funded common services and functions would be "better" than what we have, but civil forfeiture is not fundamentally different than taxation, from the perspective that OP viewed it. The government decides that is a legal way to raise revenue and they carry it out under threat of force.
You can disagree with civil forfeiture while agreeing with taxation, but not with general complaints about a state sanctioned violent gang stealing from the populace.
I'm certainly no fan of civil forfeiture but I eould argue that it's fundamentally different from taxation.
Taxes are impersonal. The rules apply to "everyone" [1]. They are written up, voted on (by congress) and so on.
Civil forfeiture is a random event made by a random cop on a targeted individual. It is the very definition of unfair.
Equally you can define taxation as "stealing" hut it's really not. (CF is stealing in my book). It was different in the past, but today taxation is used to pay for things - it doesn't just go to the bank account of a person.
-some- govt and govt services are necessary for society to function. (A quick look at places without govt demonstrate that.) And yes, one can argue about the priority of one service over another. But fundamentally govt serves the society and taxes is just the way that gets paid for.
The scale, priorities, spending of govt is obviously up for debate, but funding it is necessary, and so I don't consider taxes to be theft.
Incidentally, if you feel that all govt is bad and we should exist without one I recommend trying to live in a place where the govt is non-functioning. Thats when you discover where all that spending goes and what it achieves.
[1] for some definition of "everyone" - the system has flaws.
It's a state sanctioned violent gang that also happens to be completely immune from any sort of responsibility.
Totally different things.