Transcription
A Twitter post by Kylie Cunningham @kyyylieeeee that reads “today at the airport one of the drug dogs set off a false alarm and officers rushed over to find out the dog had alerted them for a piece of pizza. the handler just patted his head and goes “it’s okay buddy i know pizza always confuses you” and gave him his treat anyways.”
This is one of the big issues with ‘drug dogs’; they’re conditioned to give false positives for rewards.
Those same false positives the serve as grounds for an otherwise illegal search and regardless of findings are often later presented as evidence in any resulting charges as a statement of fact that the ‘dog alerted’ on the victim to bypass an individuals 4th amendment rights.
They should be required to keep a comprehensive database about any dog whose alert could be used as probable cause. Every time they alert, and whether it was successful or unsuccessful. Every time they are rewarded by their trainer. Every time they are tested and retrained.
Once the data is available, it will be extremely useful even if the police fake the data, because it will most likely be possible to tell that it’s fake.
There have been studies, dogs suck at actually finding things and are just useful for cops to create “probable cause” to do what they want.
Technically they do keep log books but if a dog doesn’t find something they just log it as trace evidence. “Some shake” " a mysterious powder" “hard crystalline substance” “there must have been people in there recently” things that would be hard to prove or disprove but maybe the hit average raise all the same.
I don’t disagree with everything you say but this post is totally fake. Trained dogs would definitely not alert for pizza, why the fuck would pizza be inside luggage, and they absolutely don’t reward these dogs for mistakes. Ffs, please use some critical sense?
What makes you say that? There is pretty strong evidence that they do.
What evidence? Dogs with jobs get pretty strict training.
The conditioning doesnt work well with a delayed reward. They dont wait until after the search and the dog is proven correct to give the reward when in the field, (unlike in the training where the handlers know which items are correct ahead of time and can only reward correct responses )
Your also making a huge assumption that the officer handling the dog is actually good at his job.
Or cares about the people they are harassing
You
The post
It’s there literally in the article that the handler rewarded the dog for a mistake. Whilst I doubt that in this case it was the handler’s intention to incentivise the dog to make that mistake more, in practice by giving the dog a treat for making that mistake they were doing positive reinforcement of that behaviour.
What article? You mean the Internet meme? Memes are passing as articles nowadays?
Does me using the wrong word (“article” instead of “tweet”) alter the point that the previous poster’s absolute statement “they absolutely don’t reward these dogs for mistakes” is just an opionated statement with no backing meant only to contradict the event related in that tweet?
In the face of two statements unsupported by evidence (the tweet and that post I replied to), what’s more believable:
It does, because a random person being humorous on twitter carries no presumption of truth. An “article” kinda implies that, unless it’s satire.
Naturally being an “article” carries some implied authoritativeness compared to “random social media post”.
However my point is about the believability of the content itself on two “random social media posts” (the tweet and the one I replied to), which carry the same level of authoritativeness (“random person on the internet says”)
As I wrote somewhere else, statements about things always or never happening, unless backed by evidence are generally false, if only because statistically there are very few things which are absolutelly so all the time and everywhere and this one is about a kind of human interaction, which is far from the kind of thing likely to be absolute.
So based on the content and assuming nothing about truthfulness of falsehood of the sources, I personally find a story about a working dog handler rewarding a dog for doing something silly but endearing is more likely to be true than a statement from somebody saying that they never do such a thing, if only because it’s unlikely that it never ever happens and if it does happen somebody might spot in and because it makes for a nice store, share the story.
Mind you, by the same rule I also think that the statement from the poster before the one I replied to about “them training the dogs to bark on command to get probable cause” is not believable on itself and without further evidence and does not logically follow from somebody noticing once a dog handler rewarding a working dog for doing somebody which is a work mistake but also is silly and enderaring
(Had I been in the same position as that handler, even knowing I would be reinforcing a mistake, I would be sorely tempted to reward the dog for the silly “detect pizza” behaviour if only because it’s funny and lovable).
I just think the poster I was replying to criticized the previous post in just as much an “opinion about everything everywhere unbacked by evident and stated as fact” way as the post they were criticizing.
It’s not an article it’s a random tweet that may or may not have been true.
In my experience descriptions of events (like the one in the article) are less likely to be false than absolute certainty general statements about things always/never happening (such as “they absolutely don’t reward these dogs for mistakes”).
This is mainly because the absolute certainty general statements are pure opinion worded as fact (i.e. with no actual study or similar to back that assertion that something always or never happens) hence usually bollocks, whilst somebody describing an event would have to willingly, explicitly and activelly be lying for it to be false.
So purelly from the way you worded things, that random tweet is already way more believable than your post.
Then beyond that, what’s described in that post is the handler being nice to the dog for their quirky behaviour, which doesn’t at sound far fetched - I’ve often seen people unthinkingly reinforcing a dog’s negative behaviour because “it’s cute” - people like dogs and often end up doing dumb things with them because they like them, which is how you end up with dogs which are too fat (which is bad for the dog) because that dog is smart and good at begging for food.
I’m not even saying that the poster you replied to claiming that handlers were purposefully mistraning the dogs was right (frankly I have no idea as, like you, they just voice opinion as fact), I’m saying that the way you tried to counter argument that post is even more bullshit than that post and now you just doubled down of scoring own goals by claiming the tweet itself is possibly a lie.
I am not the same person that you replied to.
Fair enough.
Is the post of that other person I commented on any more supported by evidence than the tweet?
If not, wouldn’t the analysis I wrote in response to your post (mistakenly thinking it was the original post) not work as an evaluation of which one is more likely to be true?
Why wouldn’t pizza be in luggage? Taking a leftover slice in a plastic bag on my carry-on to wait for my flight sounds like a fantastic idea and is way cheaper than buying food there. People pack all kinds of snacks and meals for the airport.
A dog alerting for food is also not that shocking at all, especially if the officer rewards them anyway. Sure a freshly trained dog might not do it, but if their handler still rewards them for alerting on foods then they will forget their training pretty quick.
And well an officer doing the wrong thing and disregarding their training is not hard to believe at all.
Everything in this story is definently plausible
Why is it always the overconfident idiots who can’t stay civil?
Why did you leap to the assumption that the pizza was in luggage? I dogs all the time in transit hubs out in the passenger areas, so they can pick up on people with contraband on their person. If they were searching checked in luggage, our narrator would presumably not be present and there would be no story.
The story is way more plausible that someone just walked by the dog and handler, the dog signaled, and the handler saw the slice of pizza in the guys hand and knew that his dog tended to do that.