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The real question is whether the dog is better than the officer at guessing who has drugs. If the dog is much better than the officer, it would suggest that a
by nickff 11y ago
The real question is whether the dog is better than the officer at guessing who has drugs. If the dog is much better than the officer, it would suggest that a dog 'alert' should be given more weight than the officer's guess. If the dog is no better than the officer, the dog is useless.
I say this because it is possible (and indeed likely) that the officer is also better at guessing who has drugs than a coin toss.
Full Disclosure: I have never used or trafficked contraband, but I do not support random searches or the use of drug dogs in public without a warrant, regardless of their effectiveness.
- gburt 11y agoI have no opinion on the legal and ethical issues, I was commenting only on the classifier. I don't think your first question is appropriately described as "the real question" though, as one of the coolest results of machine learning is that there are techniques for combining multiple bad classifiers [0] in to one really good one. Even more so, I think that is actually what is happening here. An officer is acting as a tier 1 filter, and then the drug dog is acting as a tier 2 filter, further reducing the number of false positives, which in a "legal and ethical" sense, we generally feel are worse than false negatives. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ensemble_learning https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ensemble_learning
- nickff 11y ago>" An officer is acting as a tier 1 filter, and then the drug dog is acting as a tier 2 filter, further reducing the number of false positives, which in a "legal and ethical" sense, we generally feel are worse than false negatives." If the officer is acting as a filter, then it seems to me like this is a search, and not allowable, because it would be subject to all the usual objections to random searches. You might be right, but if that is the only way for these searches to be better than the officer's guesses, it seems that drug dogs would not be allowed to 'sniff' in public without warrants.
- LordKano 11y agoIf the dog is much better than the officer, it would suggest that a dog 'alert' should be given more weight than the officer's guess. If the dog is no better than the officer, the dog is useless. A very big problem is that drug dogs will alert when the handler gives it subtle clues. This is done to get probable cause for a search when there is nothing more than an officer's hunch or just a desire to hassle a particular individual.
- mejari 11y agoThis is something I see claimed a lot. I'd be very interested in any information you have about this. I find it very unlikely this kind of training is part of the official training, so I'm imagining it's some kind of unintentional conditioning? Or is it done on purpose by the officers?
- lukeschlather 11y agoThis is covered in the article, and it's quite straightforward. The handler was giving the dog treats for alerting, rather than giving treats for finding drugs. The primary trouble I see is that there is no penalty for re-training dogs like this.
- mejari 11y agoThe article only discusses that the handler gives the dog treats for alerting, it doesn't go into the motivations about that, whether they're because the officers aren't considering the Pavlovian conditioning involved and are accidentally reinforcing such behavior or if it's intentional.
- kd0amg 11y agoDoes the motivation matter when we're talking about whether it establishes sufficient justification for searching someone's car? After a clear flaw is pointed out, a response of "We didn't mean to ruin the statistical power of this test" wouldn't do much to restore my confidence in its results.