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this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2024
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There was a study done where police K9 units where told they'd be testing the accuracy of the dog's ability to find drugs. In actuality, they were testing the handlers. Handlers were told drugs were hidden in a certain location, but there wasn't actually drugs there. Despite that, all their dogs alerted several times to the location the handlers were told about.
I've looked at several of these studies today and they all prove without a doubt that handlers have an effect on their dogs' behavior, but they don't prove that the dogs don't have the ability to detect what they say they can. That might become useless policy-wise if the police can nearly always cause the dog to alert, but science-wise it's dishonest to say that the dogs can't smell anything.
I don't think the dogs' ability to smell things is in question, but the ability of humans to reliably use that sense of smell and not inadvertently get the dogs to respond to an accidental or deliberate signal from their handler.
Ultimately, the dogs want to please their human, not sniff out drugs, and if police are looking for some pretext to search a car, then signaling with or without drugs will please the human.
Dogs should only be used once a warrant is issued to help speed up a search. At which point, if they aren't good at it, they'll eventually just stop using them. If they can be used to bypass warrants entirely, then that is their usefulness, not how good they are at finding drugs or not signaling when there isn't anything to be found.