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See also: >Florida v. Harris, 568 U.S. 237 (2013),[1] was a case in which the United States Supreme Court addressed the reliability of a dog sniff by a detecti

See also: >Florida v. Harris, 568 U.S. 237 (2013),[1] was a case in which the United States Supreme Court addressed the reliability of a dog sniff by a detection dog trained to identify narcotics, under the specific context of whether law enforcement's assertions that the dog is trained or certified is sufficient to establish probable cause for a search of a vehicle under the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution.[2] Harris was the first Supreme Court case to challenge the dog's reliability, backed by data that asserts that on average, up to 80% of a dog's alerts are wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_v._Harris https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florida_v._Harris

deleted 8y ago
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chrchang523 8y ago
"Up to 80% of a dog's alerts are wrong" can't be evaluated without more information about base rate. If this is occurring in a context where the dogs are only being brought out when there's already prior cause to expect narcotics with >10% likelihood, that doesn't look good for the police. But if that number is more like 1%, even an 80% false positive rate corresponds to doing more than half of the remaining classification work (it's appropriate to look at this on a logistic scale). (Also, "up to" should be unpacked; a 95% confidence interval is a lot more informative than a rough upper bound.)