Drug-sniffing dogs and the Clever-Hans effect

[phantom power]

Last edited Fri Jan 6, 2012, 12:50 PM - Edit history (1)

This obviously brings up the same issue for explosives-sniffing dogs.

Turns out the dogs are probably not sniffing drugs so much as they're reacting to their master's subconscious signals that they want to search Person X. This is an important issue for everyone, but skeptics especially need to be on this, because it's really ovious what's going on here, which is that drug dogs are a modern update of the Clever Hans problem.

...

Sebastian recounts research showing that dogs' tendency to signal has more to do with what the cop is thinking than what the dog is smelling. Anyone who knows dogs should have guessed this one; dogs are basically human-obsessed machines who watch their humans super carefully and try very hard to please them. Of course drug dogs are more worried about pleasing master than producing good results. The real world results are predictable, but no less upsetting for it:

A tracking study was done of drug sniffing dogs in Illinois which found that the searches their 'alerts' triggered found no evidence of drugs 56% of the time. For Hispanic people searched as a result of the 'alerts' there was no evidence of drugs 63% of the time.

You can read about it at the Chicago Tribune. The cops are pulling the "well, they're guilty of something" bullshit, saying the dogs are smelling drugs that used to be there. Maybe. But again, I point to the well-documented Clever Hans effect and suggest that it's something else entirely, which is that the dogs are picking up on the officers' prejudices and acting accordingly.

Obviously, the ultimate goal here is to call off the War on (Some People Who Use) Drugs, which is run on magic and bigotry, and does more to destroy communities than to prevent drug addiction. But in the more immediate future, we must demand an immediate end to all use of drug dogs, certainly until it can be demonstrated in double blind studies run by experts that the dogs are detecting drugs and not reacting to subconscious signals sent by police. Since I highly doubt that can be demonstrated, basically I'm saying that drug dogs should be permanently banned. Even if they worked, they're basically a cheap attempt by law enforcement to skirt constitutional protections, but since they don't even work, they're nothing but a magic trick used to distract from what's really going on: cops conducting illegal searches based on their own prejudices.

http://pandagon.net/index.php/site/comments/ban-the-use-of-drug-dogs.-now

[AnotherMcIntosh]

1. Good story. It's worthwhile to learn about this.

Do you wonder whether any of the police already realize that they are using a Clever-Hans response.

Do all of them not know this? What about all of the dog handlers in police uniforms who work with their dogs on a daily basis, who know how their animals respond, and who know that they are getting false positives?

[izquierdista]

2. Of course they know about it!

If you take 10 police cadets and line them up and ask them to stomp the answer to 2+3, ALL of them will stomp until you nod your head in agreement. The more years they have on the force, the better they are at discerning the signals about who they should club, pepper spray, taser, and handcuff.

[Laelth]

3. k&r for exposure. This is interesting. n/t

-Laelth

[backscatter712]

4. Who says it's always subconscious?

Often, the cops deliberately train the dogs to signal on cue so they have an excuse to toss some sod's car...

[phantom power]

5. I imagine deliberate cues would be easier to detect than the subconscious ones.

Domesticated animals are better at picking up on such subtle things than humans. The whole thing is a real shame, since absent this bias pollution a dog's nose makes a good drug detector.