Quality Control, from the cops. That’s funny.

What incentive would cops (and prosecutors) have for QC? If there’s a conviction, they they win. If not, the “SOB got away with it. We’ll get him next time”.

They pulled the car into the “further investigation” areas. I don’t know what happened.

Alas, I was overruled.”

That would have been epic! Or maybe this “Stardate 2012, While traveling through the land of the free…”

Just looking at the incentives for asset forfeiture money, you’d expect to see a long list of incidents where the greed for pirate loot tempted the cops into fights they couldn’t win, with clumsy pre-text stops against high profile businessmen, doctors, lawyers, junior league women, and the like. Yet other than the odd racial incident every few years, that doesn’t happen enough to make an impact.

Maybe that’s what the dogs are really trained for: sniffing out people at or below the lower bound of the middle class, who don’t have the political access or the funds to lawyer up properly, and who by themselves won’t make a terribly convincing witness against the state.

That’s a good point. Since the military uses dogs, I am sure it would be easy to find stories of dogs finding IEDs and probably some figures as to how many they have found. My guess is that you won’t find the figures on how many times they have falsely alerted or failed to alert, but given the military’s penchant for record keeping I would bet you that the Pentagon knows exactly. Good luck getting that information, though.

http://www.videoandcomment.com/v/iUoFZVhz48M

My recent civil right affronts story is the same: Getting pulled over for bogus reasons (“not speeding up fast enough” once out of a SPEED TRAP construction zone; not changing to right lane even though a semi-truck was blocking me–we would’ve crashed, etc. etc.). Then I comply with officer’s request, then comes the “Have you ever smoked marijuana?” and “Isn’t medical marijuana legal in WA State?” and other interrogations that have no probable cause nor anything to do with initial traffic stop. There have been other inappropriate (at best) nuances to these stops, as well. Contact me for more details. Ohio & Indiana are bad, but Illinois is the worst. I discovered this on a recent Nov. 2011 trek from Seattle to New York City. Susan

“Do police agencies do ongoing quality control using collected field data?”

Almost certainly.

If it doesn’t seem like it to you, your error is almost certainly in your assumptions about police organization goals and values.

What? Is it not blatantly obvious that Police Agencies not only DO NOT execute any ongoing quality control in these areas, but actively strive to prevent it?

They don’t want or need accurate data or quality control… they want and need mechanics that allow searches and seizures.

With explosives dogs, I am fairly certain that a false negative would soon become obvious. ;P

Almost certainly.

If it doesn’t seem like it to you, your error is almost certainly in your assumptions about police organization goals and values.

Explosives dogs in some situations might be more reliable assuming the handler has no idea where explosives might be. As explosives dogs become used more for detecting trace residues on people, I suspect the alert rate for brown-skinned young males with funny accents will skyrocket.

It rose to 74 percent if you include cases where it alerted to drugs, but police could only find “residue” or “shake.”

I would argue that those are valid alerts. The dog smelled something and alerted.

Anyone that’s ever had “shake” found in their car knows what it means: Any dust, powder, dirt, sand, gravel, or dried organic matter (leaves, grass clippings, dog crap, etc), that looks vaguely like residue or seed.

It doesn’t mean drugs were found. It doesn’t even mean drugs were ever anywhere near that car. It just means the car’s owner needs to vacuum their floorboard.

Seriously, I’ve seen a cop ask a friend why he had “shake” in the car while pointing at what was clearly the better part of an oak leaf and I’ve had one ask me about “seeds” while indicating pea gravel. It’s to see if you’ll freak out and scream “Oh god the drugs are in the trunk!” I guess.

One filmmaker (I’m guessing) used an FOIA request or some evidentiary request to get the dashcam video of his encounter. Most people who have this kind of experience would just get over it and move on. It is not feasible for the public to grab a meaningful sample, review, and hold a department accountable. At the same time, quality control needs a transparency and accessibility to instill confidence from the public.

I’ve been listening to Penn Jillette’s podcast lately. In last Sunday’s episode, he talks about getting pulled over in his Nissan Leaf by a Vegas cop recently. He makes the point that we should not be afraid of cops, nor cops of us. They are a necessary piece of keeping the peace in society, and for most people, there should not be an adversarial relationship. It’s a lesson he learned as a kid who had several interactions with the Five-Oh. And Penn’s libertarian credentials are beyond question. I think he is right. And I think Radley is right to bring light to so many of these awful abuses caused by bad officers and bad public policy. Ultimately, the way to Penn’s ideal is through sunshine.

BTW, Mannie,

It rose to 74 percent if you include cases where it alerted to drugs, but police could only find “residue” or “shake.”

I would argue that those are valid alerts. The dog smelled something and alerted.

That seems like a poor assumption, as there is no evidence for it. In the Huff case, it’s clear that some officers are willing to classify basically any debris in a vehicle as drug residue to justify the alert the K9 gave, probably in response to an officer’s perceived desire for an alert. In practical terms, the whole notion “shake” (which might more honestly be termed “shake-down residue”, given that it’s a by-product of the asset forfeiture scam) is no different from claiming the dog alerted to magic fairy dust.