D<\/span>rug-sniffing dogs are standard-issue equipment in American police departments, and even more so after 9\/11 released a flood of extra federal cash to purchase the canine cops, which can cost upwards of $15,000 each.<\/p>\n But just like their human police counterparts,\u00a0who studies have shown display \u201crobust racial bias\u201d<\/a> that makes them more predisposed to arrest or shoot black people than white people, drug-sniffing dogs are susceptible to racist behavior. The dogs have some plausible deniability: It\u2019s their handlers\u2019 fault.<\/p>\n A notable 2011 study found<\/a>\u00a0that dogs trained to detect bombs or drugs would raise an alert even if there were no drugs present \u2014 recording more than 200 \u201cerroneous alerts\u201d during a review \u2014 most probably because their handler decided there were drugs present for some other reason, and \u201ctold\u201d the innocent dog to alert with a nod or other subtle cue. Essentially, the study found that often if the handler thought there\u00a0should<\/i>\u00a0be drugs, the dog would \u201cobey\u201d and make the false positive.<\/p>\n This is a problem. An alert from a canine unit \u2014 nicknamed \u201cprobable cause on four legs,\u201d as NPR reported<\/a> \u2014 is cause enough for an arrest, a seizure, and quite possibly the first step in the civil asset forfeiture process for the unlucky owner of the house, car, or suitcase the dog \u201cfound\u201d to be drug-tainted.<\/p>\n According to some defense attorneys, this obvious flaw in the justice system is a feature, not a bug: The offices of police departments and prosecutors thrive on the cash seized in asset forfeitures, cash they can take without a criminal conviction. Police departments are often short on funds \u2014 and \u201c[i]f they want your money, they get Fido to alert to it. And Fido alerts to everything,\u201d\u00a0a defense attorney told SF Weekly.<\/a><\/p>\n As NPR noted,<\/a>\u00a0the 2011 study set off a furor among K9 units, who defended their honor with vehement denials of any bias \u2014 and later refused to participate in any follow-up studies.<\/p>\n But at least some dog-handlers admit that there\u2019s a problem and are trying to root it out. This is good, as drug-sniffing dogs aren\u2019t going away even in the era of marijuana legalization. Instead, they\u2019re merely being retrained to detect cocaine, methamphetamine and heroin \u2014 and traces of cocaine are on as much as 80 percent<\/a> of U.S. currency.<\/p>\n To be better assured that dogs are reacting to drugs and not to instructions \u2014 subconscious or otherwise \u2014 from their handlers, the Pacific Northwest Detection Dog Association is retraining canine units to \u201cscientific levels of impartiality,\u201d NPR reported.<\/p>\n Retraining units are given a room with multiple potential hiding spots to suss out. But there aren\u2019t always drugs hidden in these spots \u2014 whether there is or not is determined by a dice roll prior to the search. Sometimes there won\u2019t be any drugs for multiple searches in a row.<\/p>\n Fred Helfers, the retired K9 cop who now runs the tests, explained to NPR how a drugless room would sometimes nevertheless trigger an alert. Phantom drugs? No \u2014 bias, an insistence that there just\u00a0has<\/i>\u00a0to be drugs.<\/p>\n As he said:<\/p>\n \u201cThere were some new teams that failed that sequence,\u201d Helfers says. \u201cBecause they didn\u2019t trust their dog.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n He says those handlers couldn\u2019t get past their expectation that drugs should be there. \u201cI think they \u2018overworked\u2019 the car. Instead of going around once or twice and trusting their dog and watching their dog work, maybe they\u2019d seen something that wasn\u2019t there,\u201d Helfers says.<\/em><\/p>\n Not every drug-dog team in the country is held to such high standards. Nor is every team retrained with snuffing out bias in mind. It\u2019s also unclear what ramifications handlers who do alert to nothing at all risk.<\/p>\n Biased arrests, shootings or other high-profile instances of problem policing are just that: High profile. Public outrage over racial bias in policing has manifested in political pressure, with police chiefs losing their jobs and officers going to trial. There doesn\u2019t yet appear to be any such reckoning for unreliable drug-dog teams.<\/p>\n And that, says Andy Falco, a retired K9 handler who now works as a re-trainer and as an expert witness for defense attorneys, is part of the problem.<\/p>\n \u201cI think in the beginning [the bias and tendency to alert to nothing] is subconscious,\u201d he told NPR, \u201cbut at some point, you know, how hard do you want to work, right?\u201d<\/p>\n TELL US,<\/b> do you think cops should use drug-sniffing dogs?<\/p>\n The post The Racial Bias of Drug-Sniffing Police Dogs<\/a> appeared first on Cannabis Now<\/a>.<\/p>\n
A new report from NPR is detailing the steps that some police departments are taking \u2014 and not taking \u2014 after studies in 2011 found evidence of racial bias in drug-sniffing dogs. Drug-sniffing dogs are standard-issue equipment in American police departments, and even more so after 9\/11 released a floodContinue Reading<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[50,80,90,2176,2556],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21563"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21563"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21563\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21564,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21563\/revisions\/21564"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21563"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21563"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannabiscultivatornews.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21563"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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\nRead More: The Racial Bias of Drug-Sniffing Police Dogs<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"