[HN Gopher] Should a dog's sniff be enough to convict a person f...
___________________________________________________________________
Should a dog's sniff be enough to convict a person for murder?
Author : pseudolus
Score : 130 points
Date : 2021-10-28 16:48 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.science.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.science.org)
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| "They asked 554 mock jurors to read a story about a dog detecting
| the odor of drugs on a suspect's car even though a later search
| turned up cash but no evidence of illegal activity. Lit says the
| scenario was meant to sound preposterous. Nonetheless, two-thirds
| of jurors surveyed said they would have found the suspect
| guilty."
|
| There is a real problem right there. Looks like you could get a
| conviction based on a fortune teller.
| cm2187 wrote:
| Though that's without the defence having a chance to tell the
| jury why they should disregard that fact.
|
| But in the end, I don't think judges are doing any better. The
| only reason the justice system works is because the vast
| majority of cases aren't very complicated and have physical
| evidence. Colombo-style crime mystery is fairly rare.
| lettergram wrote:
| This is why they have an entire field focusing on finding
| unbiased juries. They conduct interviews, etc
| vkou wrote:
| Unbiased relative to the background level of nonsense that
| the general public believes?
|
| Or unbiased relative to some platonic ideal of a jury?
| pessimizer wrote:
| That's not why attorneys interview jurors. They're trying to
| find jurors who are biased but not biased enough to
| retrospectively throw the entire trial into question.
| taneq wrote:
| If you'd spent the last 40 years telling jurors that fortune
| tellers were the gold standard for detecting drug mules then
| yeah. The issue is that we've been sold the idea that drug dogs
| are effective, not that jurors are gullible.
| ClumsyPilot wrote:
| "The issue is that we've been sold the idea that drug dogs
| are effective, not that jurors are gullible."
|
| But we know that they are gullible, they take police as a
| trustworthy source of information and assume police would not
| mislead them. Nimerous studies have shown that.
| chmod600 wrote:
| And we believe that dogs are noble beyond any doubt. But
| maybe the dog just wants the handler to smile, take her home,
| and give her a steak?
| giantg2 wrote:
| That's because society, the courts, etc believe people are
| guilty before it is proven. And "reasonable" doubt is basically
| whatever they say it is, which is often unreasonable.
|
| Innocent until proven guilty is a cruel joke.
| biofox wrote:
| To me, it just highlights that there really ought to be some
| basic comprehension and reasoning test for jurors.
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| I disagree with the jury system but as I understand it
| American jurors are supposed to reflect society.
|
| If you only want smart people you leave it to the judge.
| caymanjim wrote:
| You have the right to _not_ have a jury. There are some
| downsides. It 's harder to win an appeal; jury
| nullification is off the table; plenty of judges are biased
| or uninformed. Your lawyer can't manipulate a judge as
| easily as a jury. Still, if I had to defend myself against
| some emotionally charged claim whose defense relied on
| legal technicalities, I might prefer a bench trial to a
| bunch of idiots who couldn't get out of jury duty. If the
| potential jury of "my peers" were going to be biased
| against me for reasons of religion or race or culture, I'd
| be more inclined to let a judge decide.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| What we need is a right to a multi-judge tribunal.
| caymanjim wrote:
| Agreed, although impractical due to a shortage of judges.
| You shouldn't have to rely on making it to an appeals
| panel to have your fate decided by more than the whims of
| a single person.
| reddog wrote:
| > a bunch of idiots who couldn't get out of jury duty
|
| Maybe they are not idiots, just regular folks who take
| their civic duty seriously.
| caymanjim wrote:
| Yeah, that was too dismissive. I do think there's a
| problem with juries in that the pool of people is
| narrowed to those who both want to and are able to serve.
| Some jobs will pay employees who have jury duty, but many
| will not. Some people have backup caregivers for their
| dependents, but many don't. I'm not interested enough to
| look for statistics on it, but I would be surprised if
| juries aren't primarily composed of a narrow subset of
| social classes, like upper middle class professionals,
| retired people, the childless, and the unemployed, or
| some similar categories. It should be hard to get out of
| serving and jurors should be compensated in a way that
| eliminates the financial burden without becoming an
| incentive in itself.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Do you really want to force people to make a decision?
| They will try to end the case as soon as possible correct
| outcome or not.
| ipaddr wrote:
| From my experience some people just want to convict and
| are happy to have the power to punish. Most want to get
| out of there. You might get someone trying to find
| anything not to convict. What you end up with is some
| people happy to not work, others eager to close the case
| because they are not getting paid.
|
| Personal feelings decide outcomes. I know this person is
| not guilty but this guy who loves the free lunches won't
| ever change his mind and I am worried about my mortgage.
| pessimizer wrote:
| Just regular retired folks and folks with government jobs
| that pay folks who are on jury duty.
| threatofrain wrote:
| But now you have to model a judge's incentives to
| cooperate with the justice system, given that the DA's
| office and the police have worked to bring a case this
| far.
| scotty79 wrote:
| What's worse is that judges are elected and it creates
| perverse incentives.
| dTal wrote:
| In fact jury selection is notorious for discarding
| potential jurors with intelligence, critical thinking,
| legal awareness, or domain expertise. Jurors reflect the
| part of society least qualified to be making these
| decisions.
|
| Attorneys do not want thinkers, they want predictable cogs
| in the court machine.
| parineum wrote:
| > In fact jury selection is notorious for discarding
| potential jurors with intelligence, critical thinking,
| legal awareness, or domain expertise. Jurors reflect the
| part of society least qualified to be making these
| decisions.
|
| Jurors get dismissed based on whether or not one side
| feels they decide in their favor or not. That's it.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| When there's no agreement I suspect the less educated are
| favored though.
|
| I'd believe a juror getting dismissed for knowing
| statistics and being persuadable by logical arguments,
| before I'd believe a juror being dismissed for being in a
| demographic who favors police and emotional arguments.
| oceanghost wrote:
| Just _mentioning_ FIJA can be enough to land you in jail.
| dls2016 wrote:
| About those judges...
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| So do you think it's completely impossible that you would be
| part of the 2/3rd that found the fake suspect guilty? I don't
| think basic comprehension or reasoning prevent you from
| falling for these kinds of arguments, and rather than try to
| limit possible jurors we should just bar unscientific
| evidence.
| giantg2 wrote:
| Who makes the rules for the aptitude? Who decides if it's
| scientific or not, and what the limit is (p .1 or .001,
| study design, etc)?
|
| The people running the system makes the rules. The general
| attitude is to treat the law enforcement side more
| favorably than the defendant, to the point that they are
| basically assumed guilty from the start.
| clairity wrote:
| you've just failed your own test, since you don't understand
| how and why a jury works. if you did, you'd comprehend that
| the better solution is expanding juries, not testing jurors.
| i'll let you work out why that would be the case, and perhaps
| come up with an even better option as a result.
| [deleted]
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| I sat in court once for 3 days as a potential juror. I was
| the last person that was not selected for the jury. There is
| a process like what you describe called voir dire. Both sides
| have an opportunity to interview jurors and can ask to
| eliminate some. In the case I watched there was a potential
| juror that had recently become a citizen and was very
| interested in being a juror, but she was also not a native
| English speaker and was clearly not following everything that
| was going on - both sides wanted her gone right away.
|
| You still get a jury of citizens from the local community,
| which is the point.
| zamadatix wrote:
| The process is a good one but it's not like what was
| described. Each side gets a chance to remove some jurors,
| not a chance to insure all jurors in the pool meet a
| criteria, and removal is based on how much the attorney
| thinks you'll hurt their chances not based on if you'll be
| able to accurately interpret the case. I was also the last
| person struck in a case involving IT once the prosecuting
| side found out I worked in IT. Looking at the case results
| the prosecution lost the case for reasons that would be
| apparent to anyone that understood how IT systems worked.
|
| To be clear I think the selection process is a good one (or
| at least I think it's better than other options I've heard)
| it's just not the same thing as the GP was proposing.
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| I disagree, both sides have the opportunity to ask
| potential jurors a lot of questions. The answers to those
| questions can clearly illuminate someone's comprehension
| and reasoning - they definitely did in my experience. Now
| each side does not necessarily get all of the
| eliminations that they want but that is part of the
| process.
|
| The case I watched was a domestic violence case. Both
| sides were asking potential jurors about their knowledge
| of bruising and the way bruises change/develop over time.
| One of the potential jurors was an older Engineer from an
| aerospace company you've heard of, his answer included
| explaining that the most interesting problems that he
| deals with include how one handles the unknowns of a
| given project/situation. He gave a clear indication of
| his reasoning and thought process, the prosecution
| dropped him like a hot rock.
|
| Its not a jury of your peers if its a jury of only the
| sharpest or most educated people.
| LocalH wrote:
| If you ask me, neither the prosecutor nor the defense
| attorney should be the ones striking jurors. I don't have
| a full solution to that, either, but it seems like voir
| dire is one way attorneys try to stack the deck, often
| times by excluding the most qualified jurors.
|
| But, I agree - it must first and foremost be a jury _of
| the accused 's peers_ - but that doesn't mean "man on the
| street style average joe" necessarily.
| taneq wrote:
| > Its not a jury of your peers if its a jury of only the
| sharpest or most educated people.
|
| I think the 'jury of your peers' thing is meant to be in
| the sense of 'all men are created equal'. They don't, I
| presume, intelligence test the defendant and if they
| score lowly, screen the jury to admit only dumbasses.
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| The op was advocating for 'basic comprehension and
| reasoning test' which I think voir dire covers and in my
| experience did cover. The current process is more about
| eliminating bias than screening for intelligence, which
| seems right.
|
| I think a jury should be representative of the community,
| all of the community.
| sokoloff wrote:
| If the case is engineering-heavy, I'd expect [at least]
| one side to bias the jury away from containing
| engineers/scientists. If it's heavily reliant on medical
| testimony, at least one side will try to exclude doctors,
| etc.
|
| I think that's inherent in the adversarial system (where
| each lawyer is advocating for their client's interests),
| but I also think it sucks.
| zamadatix wrote:
| First to separate the disagreements. You open by
| disagreeing that the process requiring jurors to pass a
| certain comprehension level doesn't exist today and close
| by disagreeing that the current "jury of your peers"
| process shouldn't be such a thing. Apart from being self
| conflicting claims (it can't both be the process used
| today and be against the process used today) they are 2
| separate discussions.
|
| In regards to the first disagreement GPs proposal wasn't
| "a process that optionally allows an attorney to strike
| some jurors they find have low comprehension" it was
| "there really ought to be some basic comprehension and
| reasoning test for jurors." as in a hard requirement to
| have some level of comprehension regardless if the
| attorneys wish to strike a juror based on this fact.
|
| In regards to the second disagreement you aren't
| guaranteed to a jury of your peers in the US you are
| guaranteed to an impartial jury. Jury of your peers was
| part of common law and guaranteed e.g. high class people
| would only have juries of other high class people and is
| not part of US law. A "special" or "blue ribbon" jury
| like the GP proposed are allowed to been used as deemed
| necessary by the court in many states and actually by the
| Supreme Court itself in it's only jury trial (they drew
| from a pool of merchants) they are just not mandated for
| every trial.
|
| Again I do side with your opinion that special juries
| shouldn't be the default but that's not what is under
| question.
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| Where I live, the state/county defines eligible jurors as
| registered voters and/or licensed drivers over 18. So
| 'peers' meaning eligible voters in your community/county.
| And yes, the system is rightly more about eliminating
| bias. The process of voir dire is the opportunity for
| both sides to apply their own test. Also for special
| cases, and even not so special cases, jury questionnaires
| are an option[0]. These jury questionnaires can ask all
| kinds of questions to uncover bias and certainly involve
| basic comprehension.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_questionnaire
| zamadatix wrote:
| That is likely how your state selects jurors but again
| it's not because you have a right to a jury of your peers
| (for any definition of peers). In the US the only right
| is to an impartial jury, which is indeed what voir dire
| tries to do, which has been ruled to be possible even
| with pre-filtering the juror pool.
|
| Jury questionnaires are made to provide a background for
| the attorneys during voir dire not as an aptitude test,
| as such they do not have an objective pass/fail score
| rather subjective information to allow attorneys to try
| to form the most impartial jury they can out of the pool.
| While the attorney could try to make an assumption of
| comprehension level based on the responses in the
| questionnaire
|
| 1) The attorney still has to consider lack of
| comprehension a negative thing for their chances at the
| case
|
| 2) The attorney has to be willing to use strikes for this
| reason vs other uses such as removing blatantly biased
| jurors
|
| 3) Even when both of the prior hold true the number of
| perceived "fails" may be higher than the number of
| allowed strikes. Therefore the ability to strike some
| from the pool for comprehension level is not the same as
| the pool being pre filtered for comprehension level.
|
| To be clear the GP proposal is the universal application
| an additional comprehension test one has to pass to be
| part of the pool prior to voir dire, not just that
| someone with low comprehension is allowed to be struck
| for that reason.
|
| Think of the proposal being like if your state randomly
| chose anybody instead of pre-filtering for eligible
| voters and GP proposed "we should filter out children and
| etc from the pool" with your response being "voir dire
| does that". Voir dire in that case may allow for the
| possibility of some of those people being filtered at the
| cost of a less filtered qualified jury of adults but it
| wouldn't be a replacement for pre-filtering. The same is
| true of the proposal on a minimum comprehension pre-
| filter, whether you agree with the pre-filter or not it's
| not the same as having the ability to filter some people
| in voir dire.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > Looking at the case results the prosecution lost the
| case for reasons that would be apparent to anyone that
| understood how IT systems worked.
|
| Can you share any details, even in a very abstract way,
| on what it was?
|
| I'm curious as to how weak their case was - because if it
| was something as asinine as thinking that filesystem file
| modification dates are trustworthy or that any activity
| in the Windows Event log proves that a human user was
| physically sat at the machine then I'd like to know why
| the prosecution didn't have someone on their side to tell
| them they didn't have a case so they wouldn't waste time
| with a trial?
| nobodyandproud wrote:
| > In the case I watched there was a potential juror that
| had recently become a citizen and was very interested in
| being a juror, but she was also not a native English
| speaker and was clearly not following everything that was
| going on
|
| Trust the system.
|
| Give her a few more years. The good ol' US of A will make
| her a jury-duty dodging, full-blooded American out of her.
|
| Tongue-in-cheek aside I've disappointed not to be selected
| for jury duty thus far.
| refurb wrote:
| So I sat on a 6 week felony jury and had low expectations but
| was pleasantly surprised - fellow jurors took it very
| seriously, the judges instructions are clear and written at a
| layman's level and the "presumption of innocence" dominated.
|
| Anecdotal but it really gave me faith that juries do a pretty
| good job.
| atkailash wrote:
| My experience was kinda opposite. I felt they didn't quite
| understand "shadow of a doubt". Different type of case but
| it made me distrust juries even more than I had. I
|
| Though I will say the lawyers did a decent job picking the
| jury. It was fairly diverse. But I don't think we're taught
| as a society the necessary skills to serve on a jury.
| jrockway wrote:
| I was on a grand jury and we were all a very cynical bunch.
| They presented a bunch of cases that boiled down to "person
| we don't like talked back to the police" and our jury
| refused to indict them. In one case, it was painfully
| obvious that the police officers testifying were flat-out
| lying. Their story changed from sentence to sentence. I
| think even the prosecutor thought that continuing to
| prosecute this particular case would be a career killer.
|
| Eventually the ADAs caught on that our group asked too many
| questions, and just carefully ran out the clock on our two
| week grand jury session. Cases we were halfway through
| hearing mysteriously disappeared. Apparently the other two
| juries that met during our two week cycle had to stay late
| every day, while we got dismissed early.
|
| It's one of those things where the system is designed to be
| good (23 randos get to decide if the cops are full of shit
| before you even get indicted, and you don't have to be very
| smart to see that sometimes the cops are full of shit), but
| The System turned it into something bad for no good reason.
| I guess if people aren't committing felonies, we don't need
| assistant district attorneys, and then the people that
| already do that job have their career progress reset. So
| they are forced to play into a broken system and make up
| very tenuous felonies for their own personal career gain.
| It's sad. Someone should do something about that.
|
| (I wonder if there should be an after-the-fact non-binding
| review board. Look at all the cases that were prosecuted
| over a given year, and just have a group of experts gut-
| check them. If a lot of cases seem like bullshit, dock the
| numbers for the DA's office so they suffer at election
| time.)
| Buttons840 wrote:
| The fact that your joury went home early while others
| stayed late, is this information available to the
| defense?
| jrockway wrote:
| Probably not. It operates as an on-call sort of thing.
| You show up when you're summoned and sit in a room until
| there are details of a case to present. You hear maybe 20
| minutes of testimony for a case, sit around for 2 hours,
| then hear 10 minutes of another case, etc. for 8 hours a
| day for two weeks. At some point, there is enough
| evidence to vote. (I actually don't remember the exact
| process there. I think the ADA leaves the room, and some
| number of people have to vote to indict, and then we fill
| out a piece of paper with the results. I wasn't the
| person that actually filled out the paper, I was just the
| backup if that person was absent, which they never were.)
|
| All the grand jury members are ordinary citizens with no
| special education or training. The state sends you a
| letter, you show up at the time and place they say, and
| there is no "jury selection" that excludes jurors. You're
| truly just a pool of random people from the county.
|
| (This is the New York State system. The federal system is
| different. And some states don't even have grand juries.
| It's kind of an unusual thing.)
|
| To more directly answer what you're getting at; yes, I
| felt like something a little fishy was going on. It is
| all conjecture from chatting with the other members of
| the jury while sitting around bored for 8 hours a day.
| Some of them were very good at collecting information
| about what goes on behind the scenes. The cases should
| probably be randomly load-balanced between juries,
| without the prosecutor knowing that one of them has
| difficult people on it. I would venture a guess that
| there are rules around this, and then there are "the
| rules" on how it's done in real life, and people are
| generally fine with "the rules". So it goes. Ultimately,
| the grand jury is the people's power over prosecutorial
| aggression. You, as one of those people, have to decide
| what to push for and how the jury should be run. My group
| had a lot of people in it that very strongly pushed back
| against the power of the state. Some other groups might
| not have that. That's the luck of the draw, I suppose.
|
| I'll also say that we were not being difficult for the
| sake of being difficult. They presented some cases that
| were very clear-cut, and we easily agreed to indict based
| on the evidence that was shown.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| To me, it just highlights that if you've never served on a
| jury, your opinion is merely prejudice against those who are
| (presumably) less credentialed than you are.
| pfortuny wrote:
| A jury of peers is a jury of citizens with no regard to their
| upbringing, education, rece, religion, or any other thing.
| Citizens.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| I would really like to see a much bigger juror pool and results
| sorted by on zip code.
|
| I suspect I can do an ok job predicting relative conviction
| rates based on well known location and demographic based
| stereotypes of authoritarian tendencies and attitudes toward
| drug use.
| bumby wrote:
| Would this change if instead of a drug charge it was a murder
| charge as in the article?
| HenryKissinger wrote:
| People trust dogs too much.
|
| Dogs are friendly and make good pets and all but people need to
| draw a line.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| "My dog would never bite. He just snarls and snaps like that
| when he's nervous."
|
| "My dog is a good dog at heart, but she's a rescue so you
| have to make allowances."
|
| "My dog is only growling because you are showing fear."
|
| "If you got bit, you must have done something to the dog. No
| dog bites without good reason."
|
| People "trust" dogs to a ludicrous degree, even dogs that
| clearly can't be trusted.
| Spivak wrote:
| I don't even like dogs and I think you're being
| uncharitable to what are complex living beings with
| histories and trauma just like humans. For bad but obvious
| reasons we have different levels of empathy toward
| different trauma responses. A child who freezes or fawns
| will get love and support while someone who lashes out or
| has emotional episodes will be called a bad kid or crazy
| when they need love and support too.
|
| You don't have to ever consider the behavior acceptable and
| it's never your job in particular to deal with it or be
| around them but that doesn't mean that the owner's empathy
| is invalid. And it sucks when owners are unwilling or
| incapable of helping their dog. But they're also right --
| dogs really don't bite for no reason.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| > I don't even like dogs and I think you're being
| uncharitable to what are complex living beings with
| histories and trauma just like humans.
|
| Actually it's the exact opposite. We reduce these complex
| living beings to a "all dogs are good, only people are
| bad".
|
| > But they're also right -- dogs really don't bite for no
| reason.
|
| People don't assault and kill for no reason either,
| doesn't mean their victims, or the person bitten by the
| dog is at fault.
|
| DDG "dog kills child" and come back to this thread.
| kapp_in_life wrote:
| Whenever someone says crap like this to me I feel sorry for
| the dog because its clearly poorly socialized and thats
| entirely the blame of the owner.
| Ensorceled wrote:
| Yep. Our weekly long run takes us through an off leash
| park, never had an issue with literally dozens of dogs
| every run. Dogs are all socialized; running around,
| chasing each other, running beside us, barking happily.
|
| All my unpleasant dog encounters have been with people
| who can't take their dog to the off leash park ...
| Taywee wrote:
| That's reductive. Dogs have a surprising degree of
| individuality, intelligence, and personality. There are
| dogs with anxiety disorders, psychological disorders,
| attention disorders, and other issues that aren't
| necessarily the blame of the owner (or even might be the
| fault of previous owners). Trying to reduce it to that is
| like blaming every problem behavior on somebody's
| parents. Dogs aren't simple machines.
| pxc wrote:
| Let's review some of the examples in GGP:
|
| > "My dog would never bite. He just snarls and snaps like
| that when he's nervous."
|
| If you ever hear this, the dog is being socialized in a
| bad, counterproductive way _before your very eyes_. The
| owner is ignoring manifestly severe distress, as well as
| generally unacceptable behavior in public.
|
| > "My dog is a good dog at heart, but she's a rescue so
| you have to make allowances."
|
| The word 'allowances' here is kinda strong, in that it
| sounds like you're not only giving up on eliminating
| certain negative behaviors/feelings in your dog, but also
| in managing them.
|
| But it's really close to something that I think is fair
| to say, which is that you can't expect your dog to
| instantly recover from trauma, and that you will have to
| make gradual progress on teaching your dog that the world
| is safe for them and how you expect them to behave in it.
| At the same time, it's your job to manage those behaviors
| along the way, so I'm not sure that counts as 'making
| allowances' in the sense of simply permitting otherwise
| unacceptable behavior. So it might be fair to give that
| one to the GGP, too.
|
| > "My dog is only growling because you are showing fear."
|
| This is useless information even if it's true, and it
| pushes responsibility for the dog's behavior and comfort
| onto others (probably including random strangers, given
| the character of the examples). This is poor
| socialization _in action_ again.
|
| (Aside: growling is good. It is good for dogs to give
| warning. You probably want to address the thing they're
| growling about (food possessiveness, fear, anxiety,
| mistrust of strangers), which may _not_ be good. But you
| probably don 't want to suppress growling per se or treat
| growling as bad behavior. That's a good way to get a less
| predictable dog.)
|
| > "If you got bit, you must have done something to the
| dog. No dog bites without good reason."
|
| If someone says this about their _own_ dog, they 're
| showing a stunning level of disinterest in their own
| dog's behavior, comfort, and impact on others. If someone
| tells you your dog bit them, you need to be _very_
| interested in all of the details so you can figure out
| what was going on and what you need to do about it.
| Taywee wrote:
| Yes, you're right, given the context. I hadn't properly
| followed the chain of comments, and every one of those
| statements is unreasonable. I just hear a lot of dog
| people who subscribe to the belief of "no bad dogs, only
| bad owners", which is cute, but not 100% realistic. You
| can do a lot to properly train and manage dog behavior,
| and much bad behavior is the fault of the owners, but
| there are special cases that really aren't that rare. I
| have a dog who, as far as I know, has never been abused
| and she has intense anxiety around new people and other
| dogs, despite following all the rules and doing
| everything right to try to socialize her properly for
| years. I get the ugliest stares from people when they ask
| if they can pet her and I say that she has anxiety
| problems, and that she's never bitten somebody, but I
| can't guarantee that she never would, because people she
| doesn't know stress her out quite badly. I've made a lot
| of progress with her, but I doubt I could ever get her to
| a point that she'd be perfectly comfortable around
| strangers.
| pxc wrote:
| > I get the ugliest stares from people when they ask if
| they can pet her and I say that she has anxiety problems,
| and that she's never bitten somebody, but I can't
| guarantee that she never would, because people she
| doesn't know stress her out quite badly.
|
| A dog who doesn't like to be touched by random strangers
| is not a bad dog, and strangers are not entitled to touch
| her! I'm 100% with you on this one. Many people seem to
| think that all dogs should actively enjoy all kinds of
| invasions to their personal space (that they themselves
| would never tolerate), and it's ridiculous.
|
| You're also not, in my opinion based on this description,
| 'making allowances' for any unacceptable behavior. You're
| just keeping your dog (and people around her) safe and
| comfortable, despite the misplaced sense of entitlement
| of some strangers.
| FactolSarin wrote:
| Plus everyone, even dogs, can have a bad day. I feel I'm a
| pretty judge of dogs, having grown up around them all my
| life. I know when a dog is barking to alert an owner vs
| when a dog is barking and is about to bite.
|
| But even with that in mind, I remember the one time my dog
| was playing with another dog, and suddenly the play turned
| to aggression on a dime, and I had to pull those dogs
| apart, and one ended up with a piece of it's ear gone.
| Neither dog had a history of aggression, neither has done
| anything like that ever again. There was no warning, _it
| just happened_.
|
| Why? I have no clue, and I never will, because dogs aren't
| people. I can't even know what another _human_ is thinking
| when a violent outburst happens, much less another species.
|
| So are drug-sniffing dogs reliable? I bet they are, but
| just like people sometimes they can be wrong, or they can
| have a bad day, or they can give the answer they thought
| the trainer wanted. Who knows? We don't know how they
| experience the world enough to even make a guess.
| pxc wrote:
| People who do this stuff might think they're trusting their
| dogs, but they're neglecting them.
|
| > "My dog would never bite. He just snarls and snaps like
| that when he's nervous."
|
| A dog who is snarling and snapping is doing the canine
| equivalent of screaming 'GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME RIGHT
| NOW'. Actually trusting that dog would have to mean
| _believing it when it tells you it is uncomfortable and
| feeling threatened_. If you trust someone and they tell you
| they need to be removed from a situation, _you do it_.
|
| > "If you got bit, you must have done something to the dog.
| No dog bites without good reason."
|
| Honestly, this is the other side of people 'trusting' dogs
| too much. Most people who get bit by dogs are doing
| something extremely stupid, and most people who get bit by
| _other people 's_ dogs are doing something extremely
| presumptuous and invasive.
|
| If what you're interested in is whether a dog is vicious
| (i.e., how easily it can be rehabilitated or accommodated
| so that it never bites anyone again for the rest of its
| long, happy life), the secondhand judgment of someone who
| got bit by the dog is generally unreliable unless it's
| accompanied by a detailed account. Unfortunately, being a
| 'dog person' or someone who 'loves dogs' or 'has had dogs
| their whole life' doesn't at all assure that a person can
| read basic canine body language, either.
| marvin wrote:
| I got bitten by a dog that looked at me from six meters
| away when I came out of the owner's car (with the owner
| driving! We were chatting amicably at the time), then
| with no other warning than standing very still for two
| seconds ran at me and bit my leg to the point of
| bleeding.
|
| Then, when I met it again three years later, tried to do
| the same thing but by that point they'd wised up and
| anchored its leash to something. Although, you know,
| maybe there existed a more constructive solution.
|
| And my cousin was bit three times (required stitches) by
| a dog she never approached, and backed away from
| carefully after it became obvious that it was unfriendly,
| running away after it bit her the first time. She did
| accidentally enter the owner's property, though, while
| jogging. The property boundary wasn't marked.
|
| I don't think you can generalize this stuff, unless
| you've made a detailed survey of the conditions
| concerning situations where dogs have bit people.
| chmod600 wrote:
| We celebrate "science", but we skip the scientific method.
| Observational studies, unreprodcible experiments, and non-
| falsifiable models have taken over.
|
| Not just taken over in pop science, but actual scientific fields.
|
| So can we really blame judges and juries for taking a few
| intellectual short cuts? Yes, I suppose we can, because an
| individual is at risk and we should expect better.
|
| But the scientific community should take some blame for
| compromising on the core of science while continuing to fly the
| banner of science.
| LightG wrote:
| No. I've not read tfa but being stopped under suspicion of
| carrying drugs at an aiport because a sniffer-dog got a bit too
| excited about a humous sandwich I'd just bought tells me answer
| to this question.
|
| Also raising the question of whether a sniffer-dog can be
| manipulated by its handler.
|
| Questons, questions ...
| ghufran_syed wrote:
| Seems like the appropriate defense strategy should be to arrange
| their _own_ cadaver dog analysis which shows _completely
| contradictory_ evidence to that of the the prosecution dog.
| dzink wrote:
| There was a news mention months ago of a dog at a police
| department that "detected" drugs 100% of the time ot was deployed
| - the running joke was that the dog was brought in whenever they
| wanted to detain anybody. A dog is only as good as it's training
| and there is plenty of room for abuse in the system.
| Buttons840 wrote:
| Mine as well just let the officer sniff. Yeah, human smell
| isn't up to the task and will be wildly inaccurate, but that's
| not a problems for dogs, so why should it be a problem for
| humans?
| kolanos wrote:
| A drug sniffing dog is a violation of the confrontation clause in
| the sixth amendment. It provides that " in all criminal
| prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right...to be
| confronted with the witnesses against him." You can't cross-
| examine a dog.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| No, but you can run your own test, where a neutral "handler"
| whom the dog has never seen runs his/her own scent tests on the
| dog's ability. Which should be the defendant's right if dog
| evidence is presented against him.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| Much as I think there's a lot of quackery going on here, I
| think it's pretty clear that the dog _handler_ is the one
| giving the evidence and being subject to cross-examination. The
| dog is just a tool that is being used to achieve an
| investigative purpose, like a DNA test or radar gun.
| kolanos wrote:
| The dog handler's "evidence" cannot be based on the dog's
| behavior. We can't question the dog as to why it behaved the
| way it did. As such, it is a violation of the confrontation
| clause.
| elmolino89 wrote:
| Imagine a drug detecting dog going through 100 apartments. No
| drugs were found in any of them but say in 5 of them the dog sat
| on his bottom /barked/did whatever constitutes something
| resembling "drug odor detected". I hope no judge will put the
| people who did live in these apartments up to half a year before
| in jail.
| alphabettsy wrote:
| Not just that, but the dog's indication is used to do
| incredibly invasive searches that the government does not have
| to incur the costs of the damage done.
|
| They will essentially toss a home or vehicle like a burglar,
| even going as far as cutting open things like seats and
| removing parts.
| MertsA wrote:
| Not only will police occasionally destroy vehicles in a
| search without being liable for the damages, often any
| insurance policies also do not cover it. You can do
| absolutely nothing wrong and obey the law and buy
| comprehensive coverage and gap insurance and still have your
| vehicle destroyed by the cops because they managed to
| convince a dog to scratch your paint, and you're the one
| that's stuck with a totalled vehicle and a huge loan to pay
| off.
|
| https://reason.com/2021/04/23/the-cops-trashed-her-house-
| she... https://jalopnik.com/new-jersey-cops-destroy-bmw-
| searching-f...
| kortex wrote:
| This should be really easy to settle, like basic undergrad
| experimental design, double blind study. Hardly a thorough
| literature search, but I found this reference.
|
| > On average, hidden drug samples were indicated by dogs after 64
| s searching time, with 87.7% indications being correct and 5.3%
| being false. In 7.0% of trials dogs failed to find the drug
| sample within 10 min. ... > Dogs were equally efficient at
| searching in well-known vs. unknown rooms with strange (i.e.,
| non-target novelty) odors (83.2% correct indications), but they
| were less accurate when searching outside or inside cars (63.5%
| and 57.9% correct indications respectively).
|
| So that tells me two rough indicators:
|
| - There's a ~5% chance a sniffer dog/handler could put away an
| innocent person. This is a lower bound, the risk is higher with
| cues/confirmation bias
|
| - There's only about ~60-80% sensitivity in unfamiliar
| situations, of what I presume are pretty fresh samples.
|
| You don't have to bust out Bayes' theorem to realize that a
| cadaver dog accurately hitting scents in the woods months later,
| stretches credibility.
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03790...
| Zigurd wrote:
| Dogs are amazingly good at detecting things like cancer in
| _double blind experiments._ There are good reasons to think
| dogs can detect lots of things.
|
| That's not the problem:
|
| 1. No MD would order cancer treatment on the basis of a dog's
| sniff.
|
| 2. Analysis of all kinds of evidence, including the use of
| sniffer dogs, should not be managed by police departments, or
| even prosecutors. There have been many scandals of police
| evidence handling, even by supposedly professional evidence
| labs, have mishandled evidence and innocent people have been
| imprisoned. There needs to be independent analysis of evidence,
| incentivised to find the truth even if unfavorable to police
| and prosecutors.
|
| 3. Cops lie.
| flatline wrote:
| Unfortunately there is more than statistics at play:
| http://www.wayne-county-forfeiture.com/content/drug-dogs-and...
| jakelazaroff wrote:
| The problem with a purely quantitative analysis of a dog's
| theoretical capabilities is that they can be trained to give
| false positives. See for example this Reason article [1] about
| dogs searching for drugs:
|
| _> As a drug detection dog, Karma kept his nose down and
| treated every suspect the same. Public records show that from
| the time he arrived in Republic in January 2018 until his
| handler took a leave of absence to campaign for public office
| in 2020, Karma gave an "alert" indicating the presence of
| drugs 100 percent of the time during roadside sniffs outside
| vehicles._
|
| _> Similar patterns abound nationwide, suggesting that Karma
| 's career was not unusual. Lex, a drug detection dog in
| Illinois, alerted for narcotics 93 percent of the time during
| roadside sniffs, but was wrong in more than 40 percent of
| cases. Sella, a drug detection dog in Florida, gave false
| alerts 53 percent of the time. Bono, a drug detection dog in
| Virginia, incorrectly indicated the presence of drugs 74
| percent of the time._
|
| [1] https://reason.com/2021/05/13/the-police-dog-who-cried-
| drugs...
| kortex wrote:
| Right, that was being generous, assuming the ideal
| conditions, double blinded, so that any cues from the handler
| will only add noise and move the needle towards chance.
|
| In actuality, the police drug dogs are basically just an
| excuse to get into the vehicle, so they can justify anything
| they find post-hoc and ignore all other intrusions.
| ufmace wrote:
| I don't think you can really judge dogs in general based on
| statistics like this. We can't read a dogs mind and don't know
| all of their motivations. You can try and do standardized
| training and testing, but any particular dog might not "get"
| the training properly, or might decide to do something a little
| different one day for reasons we don't understand.
|
| I'm thinking, it's okay to have a dog to guide you to things,
| but ultimately, the thing is either there, or it's not, and
| that's what any convictions should be based upon. If a dog
| guides you to an actual body, fine, do all your analysis and
| charges based on that. This whole business of the dog claiming
| that a body was there months or years ago but we have no idea
| where it is now seems like bullshit, and I don't think anyone
| should ever be convicted on that alone. Ditto drugs - search
| dogs may be imperfect, but ultimately the drugs are either
| there or they're not. If the dog guides you to actual drugs,
| charge away I guess. If there aren't any drugs and the dog was
| wrong, then no charges. It's a little bad that someone got
| searched based on a false indication, but not nearly as bad as
| an actual conviction and sentence.
| 6gvONxR4sf7o wrote:
| If you do want to pull out bayes theorem, 5% of indications
| being false in an experimental setting could be way worse in a
| situation with a lower base rate. (I couldn't find the base
| rate in a quick scan of the paper)
| kortex wrote:
| Yeah I didn't compute the Bayes factor mostly because I'm on
| mobile and was heading out the door. But when the prior you
| are plugging in is "did this person murder their son", you
| need a pretty hefty likelihood ratio to push that into the
| territory of "lock this person up for life".
|
| If you have p(D|H) = 0.8 (hit rate) and p(D|H') = 0.05 (false
| positive), that gives an LR (likelihood ratio) of 16.
|
| But that's if you had like, a perfect detection situation.
| I'm not a fan, but it's probably enough to push a search into
| probable causedeg, since if you find contraband, you now have
| field drug tests, which are also kinda crapdegdeg, but it
| pushes your hypothesis. Then you seize the drugs and have the
| highly sensitive and selective lab tests of chemical analysis
| at your disposal. You have a chain of tests updating your
| prior.
|
| We have no such chain in the cabin test. It's just "dog
| signaled" -> some other circumstantial evidence -> jury
| convicts of murder.
|
| deg - that's assuming the handler is being unbiased, vs just
| giving the cops an excuse to search.
|
| degdeg - field drug tests basically only catch broad classes
| of molecules or functional groups, when performed correctly.
| Like drug dogs, often they too are just theater to
| intimidate/coerce more searching
| helsinkiandrew wrote:
| TLDR: No
|
| Usually it's not a dogs sniff but the dog handlers evidence about
| the behaviour of the sniffer dog. And dogs are far too good at
| behaving to please their handler/owner sometimes and acting out
| of instinct or boredom in others - how many dogs that have gone
| on a murderous rampage have been said to be sweet, loving
| creatures all their lives.
|
| It's hard to see how a dogs sniff evidence can be treated with
| the same level of accuracy as fingerprints/DNA evidence unless
| tests had proved that it (perhaps even the individual dog) was
| accurate to 1 in 1000 or 1 in 10,000 or more cases.
| Jon_Lowtek wrote:
| >> _Corcoran had trained Molly to sit when the dog detected the
| odor of human remains ... the team went to Redwine's cabin,
| which was unoccupied. Molly sat down in a nearby stream and
| indicated at five other locations outside the home, according
| to Corcoran. Then she saw her dog looking up at a window. An
| investigator climbed into the house and opened the door for
| Corcoran and Molly. Inside, the dog made its indication--a sit
| --near a wood stove, in a bedroom, on a brown sofa, by a
| washing machine, and elsewhere._
|
| insert "this is worthless" spongebob meme template here.
| Convicting someone of murder because a dog sat in their house
| is worse then fake science, it is worse than superstition, that
| dog handler is blatantly creating fake evidence. Has that dog
| ever cleared someone of an accusation their handler believes in
| by refusing to sit near their stuff?
|
| Edit: to clarify, a cadaver dog is useful, if one searches for
| a cadaver: when the dog indicates a specific place one should
| dig there. But that is not how the dog is used here.
| h2odragon wrote:
| IMO, this discussion goes wrong when we involve the dog in
| the first place. The testimony is that of the handler; _they_
| are the party saying that they have reason to believe X,
| based on their interpretation of their dog 's behavior...
| which might as well be a dowsing rod or any other scrying
| method for the repeatability it has.
|
| If a dog/handler leads them to evidence, then the evidence
| can stand (or not) on its own just as if they were led to it
| by a psychic or a "hunch".
| annoyingnoob wrote:
| I had a security dog in an airport come and sit next to me
| while I was standing in line. Thought for sure my day was
| over, really freaked me out because of stories like this.
| Nothing happened, I think the dog just figured me for the dog
| person that I am. You are not supposed to pet working dogs
| while they are working but that didn't stop me.
| nikkinana wrote:
| Absolutely. Or do you hate dogs too?
| amelius wrote:
| Similar question:
|
| Should Machine Learning be allowed to drive a car?
| [deleted]
| iso1210 wrote:
| Not at all a similar question, the outcome of machine learning
| of driving a car can be judged on objective results (incidents,
| accidents, injuries, deaths, etc)
| amelius wrote:
| Sorry, can't agree. You can validate the performance of dogs
| in a test setup, just like you can validate machine learning
| in a sandbox environment.
| sebow wrote:
| You're right there but that's not why these are not similar
| questions.
|
| A ML agent driving a car is about being able to do
| something out of "it's own agency"(We'll pass the free will
| observations for now, they're really irrelevant unless
| that's the point one makes between a ML agent and a dog,
| where the latter arguably has it compared to the former),
| the focus here being on "doing". A dog's sniff being
| considered as enough evidence to put someone in jail is not
| really the equivalent to "the dog has put X in
| jail".There's a case to resolve, and obviously the
| person/agent who has the evidence does not put the criminal
| in jail.Here the focus would be on the fact that the dog is
| not only observing something, but also the subjective
| interpretation of it's senses (assuming we would have such
| a thing as an "objective interpretation of one's senses at
| a given time", which is problematic imo)
| ootsootsoots wrote:
| So can the judicial system.
|
| Given the number of imprisoned found innocent over time, some
| models suggest up to 25% of the incarcerated population are
| innocent.
|
| Layer on those in prison for minor drug crimes and it goes up
| dramatically.
|
| Everything is quantifiable. The dimwitted elders in charge
| prefer you don't think like that. Just abide the story;
| senile elders raised in a era of worse education standards,
| social standards, toxic leaded gas clouds, paranoia inducing
| world wars and cold wars are clearly the most capable
| leadership
| swilliamsio wrote:
| That similar question and this entire thread reminds me of xkcd
| 2173. [0] We obviously already let neural networks detect drugs
| and drive cars, though the former gets to wear a nice fluffy
| fur coat.
|
| [0] https://xkcd.com/2173/
| goodpoint wrote:
| If ML had well documented biases towards hitting people on
| purpose, then no.
| amelius wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28219948
| bayesian_horse wrote:
| Dogs learn to please their handlers and react to their cues.
|
| Any reliable use of dogs (or any animal for that matter) must
| have the paranoid kind of quality control known from machine
| learning. Worse, actually, because an animal is a learning agent,
| shifting its model.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| Making no opinion one way or the other, convictions are (I
| suspect) routinely made on eyewitness testimony which has been
| show many, MANY times to be horribly unreliable.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| I was going to say the same. Not to mention how people are
| conditioned to trust cops and how prosecutors only need to get
| a person to say that they saw someone do something or heard
| them talk about it and a cop to say, yes this person is bad
| based on my interactions, in order to get conviction..
| regardless if there is any real evidence, or evidence to the
| contrary in that matter.
| FpUser wrote:
| Whatever the fuck happened to "beyond the reasonable doubts". Any
| reasonable person should have such in this case.
| vkou wrote:
| You'd be surprised by what reasonable jurists believe is
| damning evidence.
| FpUser wrote:
| Well, not really. After reading about some cases I've long
| lost any trust I may have had in the system. It might be ok
| in general (do not have enough real stats) but when it comes
| to fucking up particular person's life without any
| consequences the government / their institutions shine.
| pitay wrote:
| Yeah the lack of consequences for those that administer
| justice is (I believe) the strongest reason an innocent
| person is convicted or punished far too harshly for the
| given crime. The only time I have heard of judges ever
| getting punished for their judgments is either when it is
| revealed that they have been taking bribes or their nation
| lost a war.
| chmod600 wrote:
| Where can I find I good test for scientific and statistical
| reasoning? Something a layperson could easily take, like a bunch
| of word problems that aren't numbers-heavy?
| renewiltord wrote:
| Dogs are cuddly AI. The first time we make a Convolutional Neural
| Network warm, cute, and fuzzy we will have created the perfect
| tool of the police state.
|
| Which naturally means that we already have created the perfect
| tool. It's a dog.
|
| Nothing wrong with police in general. They're just like dogs in
| their own way. Dogs get treats when they say there's a drug,
| irrespective of the actual presence. Cops get treats when they a
| guy gets arrested or convicted, irrespective of guilt.
| marsdepinski wrote:
| It's science!
| AlbertCory wrote:
| After reading all the comments (a dirty job, but someone has to
| do it), I reach this conclusion, which doesn't require any
| massive changes to our justice system:
|
| _The constitutional right to "confront" a witness against you
| should be interpreted as the right to run your own unbiased tests
| on any dog whose results are used. This would mean a neutral
| handler whom the dog doesn't know conducts double-blind tests on
| the dog. If the dog is found to be unreliable by the judge, then
| the evidence is discarded, the same as if a warrantless search
| had been conducted._
| ChrisKnott wrote:
| Techniques like this should only ever be used to direct
| investigations, and not be presented at court as evidence in
| their own right. It seems they work _to an extent_ , but we
| clearly don't understand when and why they don't work.
| grae_QED wrote:
| Fun fact: The Stasi had a scent library[0]. They would regularly
| use dogs to identify and arrest people.
|
| [0] https://theresagameinthat.blogspot.com/2011/06/stasi-
| scent-l...
| andi999 wrote:
| Can we just get back the polygraph?
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| It's sad that a bullshit system that the accused and the
| accuser can easily game is one of the "successes" of forensics.
| At least there the accused can do something.
| eftychis wrote:
| Or even better uniformly at random imprison some possible
| suspect -- you avoid the cost of the trial and you are fairly
| certain that an honest person is in jail -- that seems to be
| the goal of the system: let the jurors, judge and cops sleep at
| night. Who cares about justice anyways...
| andi999 wrote:
| No smoke without fire they say.
| adam-p wrote:
| This seems analogous to using an AI. We trained it, it seems to
| mostly do what we want it to do, but we don't entirely understand
| how (or what cues and confounding factors might be in play that
| wouldn't like if we did know about).
|
| Do jurors respond the same way to a black-box "expert" if it's
| not furry?
| dehrmann wrote:
| It's worse than AI. At least with AI, we know the inputs, can
| get glimpses into how it works, and was build with a specific
| intent. Fido just wants his treat.
| dymk wrote:
| Nah it's much more similar than you're implying. Fido is
| doing stochastic descent to get his treat. Humans are
| determine the loss function for both AI training and dog
| training.
| deepsun wrote:
| Unlike AI, sniff dogs are trained to bark at a sign from it's
| owner. So whenever police wants to search you, they make a sign
| to the dog, and it barks.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| This is patently false, you get your information from movies
| and not real life. Sniff dogs sit when they detect what
| they're looking for, they do not bark.
| deepsun wrote:
| Sure, they sit at the command of their officer. That's not
| my point. My point is that it's easy to make a case for a
| search with a dog.
| betwixthewires wrote:
| And my point is, if you don't even know the first thing
| about their training you're just making shit up because
| you want to believe it. Read a little about sniffing
| dogs.
| harha wrote:
| This shows a greater dilemma: we don't want a caste of legal
| experts making fundamental decisions for an individuals life, but
| the alternative of getting a jury consisting of the average
| population who lack sufficient education also doesn't lead to an
| outcome one would want when on trial.
|
| I wonder if there is a middle ground solution where the jury
| decides on parts of a trial independently without knowledge of
| other parts, e.g. only on admitting a piece of evidence.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| There is a huge difference between a dog finding a body (material
| evidence independent of the dog's behavioral characteristics) and
| a dog handler "reading" his dog's behavior and making various
| predictions out of it. The latter should absolutely not have any
| value in court.
|
| And to think that we laugh at the Romans for predicting future
| from the flight of birds (augury) and animal liver (haruspexy)...
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > predicting future from the flight of birds
|
| Well, to be fair, we can - to the extent that when I see birds
| fly-off from my back-garden I know it's about to rain...
| ashtonkem wrote:
| And to be fair, if you're a subsistance farmer the ability to
| predict rain and other weather events is a huge percentage of
| the future you care about. Augury would be able to predict a
| decent bit of the important future for those people.
| agys wrote:
| Thank you for "augury"! I looked up the etymology in Italian
| for auguri and it derives from the flight of birds. "Tanti
| auguri" means "best wishes", on the contrary "sciagura" (same
| root as "auguri") means "misfortune".
| NHQ wrote:
| A dog cannot take the stand and be questioned, so how can it
| provide witness?
| jjluoma wrote:
| The same dog was used in all occasions: 1) sniffing of the
| clothes 2) around the house 3) inside the house 4) sniffing the
| truck.
|
| I would question if the dog was essentially trained to recognize
| the smell of the suspect, and if so, did the dog really indicate
| it was smelling odors from a dead body or the odors from the
| suspect.
|
| Also, only clothes of the suspect from an evidence room? Only one
| truck?
| kolanos wrote:
| > I would question if the dog was essentially trained to
| recognize the smell of the suspect, and if so, did the dog
| really indicate it was smelling odors from a dead body or the
| odors from the suspect.
|
| And upon questioning, how would you possibly be able to verify?
| eftychis wrote:
| You mean accept as evidence a dog's reaction which has been
| criticized and known to be directed by officers/handlers for
| illegal searches (by providing fake probable causes). A dog that
| you can not ask what they detected or even statistically test as
| we have seen in the article like you could do an ML model.
|
| A whole field has been sprung on _if and how_ ML inference could
| be used to make decisions, with lots of issues of racial
| profiling. And the judge and jury decided to accept a dog 's
| reaction whose handler's new career was on the line.
|
| I am not sure why one should trust the justice system these days.
|
| P.S. A bunch of posts about Donziger and how UN Working Group on
| Arbitrary Detention has stated to the U.S. he detention and
| imprisonment is against international law. I just find the
| sequence of articles ironic.
| tqi wrote:
| Agreed. If Ring doorbell cameras were giving bogus probable
| cause at the rate these dogs were, the NYT would be all over
| it. But because it's not novel no reporters can be bothered to
| write about it...
| sebow wrote:
| No.
|
| It should be taken into account, but it shouldn't be considered
| "definitive" evidence (compared to something like a video
| footage).
| ootsootsoots wrote:
| Given the credibility of American governance, no.
|
| Frankly I would not trust most Americans to host a bbq without
| lighting someone on fire these days. There's no way I'd sincerely
| trust their dogs.
|
| Those in policing are barely better educated than the dog.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I dismiss anything Corcoran says after I read this:
|
| _There's so many missing people that need to be found. You know,
| it's just sad. And that's really what it's all about: If we can
| recover somebody, so their family can know the ending. That's
| really what it should be about._
|
| So this is _totally_ about the problem, and not the "solution."
| If you're attacking her, you're against families finding out what
| they need to know. BS.
|
| Maybe if she said something about the reliability of the method,
| and not the need for ANY method, I'd pay more attention.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2021-10-30 23:02 UTC)