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Drug Sniffer Dogs: Oddities & Issues

Mighty_Emperor

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This is just weird:

Wednesday, January 12, 2005

Cop charged with stealing, killing bomb-sniffing dog

By Raquel C. Bagnol

FOR allegedly stealing, killing and eating a bomb-sniffing dog owned by another police officer at the Police Regional Office (PRO) 11 compound last year, a policeman has been slapped with two criminal cases before the City Prosecutor's Office (CPO).

SPO2 Remberto Orencia, detailed as guard of PRO 11 was sued for theft and for violation of RA 8485 (Animal Welfare Act of 1998).

The complaint was filed by Goldie Delvo, wife of Major Alden Delvo of the same office.

In her affidavit, Delvo alleged that Orencia stole, killed and ate her four-year-old Labrador named Kobe at around 12 noon on October 28, 2004, while they were in Cebu City for a vacation.

Delvo said that her Labrador, which cost her P15,000 had undergone a six-month training course with the Special Anti-Terrorist Unit (Satu) for bomb sniffing prior to its death.

She said Kobe even participated in various police operations to discover hidden bombs and other explosives.

Delvo said her neighbors informed her that Orencia allegedly hit Kobe with a piece of wood and slashed its neck with a knife.

She was also informed that Orencia allegedly cooked the dog and ate it afterwards.


Delvo said that when her husband confronted Orencia, the later reasoned out that he killed the dog in compliance with the order of the PRO head to kill all stray dogs in the vicinity.

But Delvo said that Orencia's alibi is unacceptable and there was ill motive on his part because he even ate the dog.

Delvo also said her family suffered a lot with the dog's death because the dog was very close to the whole family, especially to her children.

Two minors who claimed to have witnessed the incident executed an affidavit to support Delvo's complaint.

The two boys said they were gathering mangoes that noon when Kobe followed them.

They said they saw Orencia hit the dog with a piece of wood and slashed its neck afterwards

Source
 
Talcum Sniffer Dogs!

Powder mix-up fools sniffer dogs

A team of Australian drug sniffer dogs has been sent back for retraining, after it was found they could only track talcum powder, not cocaine.
Melbourne police found that the white powder used to hone the dogs' nostrils was not in fact an illegal substance.

A probe is now under way to see whether any illicit drugs have gone missing.

"They're very good at detecting talcum powder," joked Assistant Commissioner Paul Evans. "If there's any missing kids, we'll find them fairly quickly."

The seven dogs had been in training since January.

They are meant to sit down next to a person, when they detect the scent of cocaine.

Unfortunately, the dogs have yet to smell the drug, since the bag of white powder supplied by the Australian Federal Police for the canine training turned out to be talcum powder.

Police in Victoria have launched an inquiry to see whether any cocaine has gone missing.

But Assistant Commissioner Evans said that drugs were sometimes cut with other substances.

It was also possible that the training bag was mislabelled.

"It's embarrassing," Mr Evans told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

"It shouldn't happen, it did happen, it certainly tested our audit procedures, which have worked in this case.

"We have picked it up ourselves fairly quickly."

Victoria's Police Minister Tim Holding was unimpressed.

"I was surprised and I was disappointed," he said.

There is no word on how long it will take to break the dogs' talcum habit and retrain them to react only to cocaine.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-p ... 568321.stm
Made me smile! :p
 
Smells suspicious
Dogs have long been used by police forces to detect drugs and explosives. But now animals and machines are being trained and developed to sniff out a person's potential for aggression, if they are feeling guilty - even their race.
Amber Marks reports
Amber Marks The Guardian, Monday March 31 2008

I was walking into Fulham Broadway underground station a couple of years ago when I saw police officers holding dogs on leashes, encouraging them to sniff the crotches of passing commuters. What, I asked one of the policemen, was the purpose of this operation?

"I can't say," he replied.

I explained that I was a lawyer with a professional interest in crime. He looked at me with something approaching interest. "Well, you know that most crime is caused by drugs?"

"Yes," I lied.

"These dogs can smell the smallest trace of a drug on a person. Once the dog has picked up a scent of drugs on them, we have the right to search them. If we find drugs on them, we can then search their homes and in their homes we usually find all manner of incriminating articles."

Who needs a warrant when you've got a dog? Olfactory surveillance - the monitoring of personal odour - is on the increase. The number of dogs trained in the detection of criminal suspects and substances is growing. But dogs aren't the only tool envisioned for the future. The Home Office is known to have funded at least one study into the feasibility of releasing swarms of trained bees to search out target odours. The US has similar plans for moths, bees, wasps and cockroaches, and Russia has cross-bred jackals with dogs for an enhanced sense of smell. Even yeast has been genetically manipulated to react to molecules of interest to the security services. Companies across the globe are designing and touting "electronic noses", machines that seek to mimic the mammalian sensory apparatus, in an attempt to satisfy new security demands.

"Headspace" (a term borrowed from the beat generation, where it connoted psychological privacy) is the technical term for the area surrounding an object or person in which their odour can be analysed. But odour detection is not limited to the discovery of drugs and explosives. Scientists and electronic nose entrepreneurs claim headspace analysis can reveal everything from the substances people have been in contact with and their emotional state, to their personal identity and ethnic origin. Although the science behind this field is nascent and the scientific validity of such claims is hotly disputed, they are gaining in stature. Researchers believe the unique smell that we each emit is tied to the makeup of the major histocompatibility complex, a group of genes found on the surface of T-cells that are crucial to the immune system. Several police dog handlers attribute their dogs' knack for identifying criminals to an ability to detect the scent of fear emitted by the guilty, and a synthesised version of this scent is available as a training aid. Scientists are undertaking research into how potential aggressors - or even, for instance, people with schizophrenia - might be identified by the odours they emit. In the 90s an electronic nose company based in the UK was approached by the South African police for the "odour signature" of black people. A company representative told me they refused to supply it, but could have done. He said that ethnic signatures are quickly obtainable by finding patterns between the molecules present in the headspace of different ethnic groups. He added that his electronic nose had already been trained to detect at what stage a woman was in her menstrual cycle, "just by sniffing her from the other side of the room".

Once referred to as the "neglected sense", the science of olfaction is experiencing a resurgence of interest and researchers predict that, in the near future, our knowledge of it will rival that of the visual sciences. Biologist Lyall Watson outlines the pivotal role played by the olfactory system in his book Jacobson's Organ and the Remarkable Sense of Smell: "There is a general and universal system of chemical communication in which all living things are involved. The result is a coordinated ecological mechanism for the regulation of who goes where, and how many can afford to do so." The security services want to tap into this primordial information, then exchange and use it in border controls and the wars on crime, terrorism and antisocial behaviour. Watson predicts that a heightened olfactory consciousness will enable us to "get to know who the good guys are". The security services seem to think the science of olfaction is already sufficiently advanced to enable them to do this.

Last summer, Der Spiegel magazine revealed that the German police had been collecting human scents from political activists to enable their dogs to trace persons they believed might try to violently disrupt the G8 summit. China has established a "scent bank" of odours sampled from criminal suspects and crime scenes. According to a document leaked to the Observer, GCHQ, the British intelligence agency, has been evaluating the merits of odour as a means of personal identification.

.......................

In 2001, the US supreme court recognised this new threat to privacy. In Kyllo v United States, the police had aimed a thermal-imaging device at Danny Kyllo's residence to detect heat emanations associated with high-powered marijuana grow-lamps. The court held that when the police obtain by sense-enhancing technology any information regarding the interior of a home that could not otherwise have been obtained without physical intrusion, it constitutes a search. The court observed that this would ensure preservation of that degree of privacy and protection from government intrusion that existed when the US constitution was drafted. Justice Souter has since stated that "if constitutional scrutiny is in order for the imager, it is in order for the dog".

In Britain, there has yet to be any challenge to the legality of sniffer dog operations. The Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) is adamant that a sniff does not amount to a search and that an indication from a trained dog amounts to reasonable grounds of suspicion for a stop and search. Acpo reasons that because the dog is deployed to "scent the air surrounding an individual person" and indicate the presence of the smell "in the close vicinity of an individual" no search of the person takes place. In this way, Acpo distances the subject from the source of the scent, to justify its denial that the sniff amounts to a search - and then re-links the subject to the scent to justify a tactile search.

Acpo guidance on the use of sniffer dogs concedes that a police-dog sniff could amount to a search if a person is "funnelled" past the dogs. The guidance clearly states that the police should not funnel people past a sniffer dog because officers have no powers to insist that a member of the public submit to a dog sniff. But commuters, confronted with police dogs at the top of escalators, are faced with little choice on exiting a station. "We don't have any power to tell people to walk past the dog," one senior dog handler conceded. "But we can take advantage of the natural environment." Officers treat attempts to evade a dog as grounds of reasonable suspicion for a stop and search.

................

The suspicion generated by an alert from a sniffer dog is difficult to dissipate, as the investigation into the disappearance of Madeleine McCann and the supposed "scent of death" illustrates. Three months after Madeleine's disappearance, dog handler Martin Grime (then working for South Yorkshire police, now for Jersey police on a freelance basis in the search for human remains at Haut de la Garenne) flew out to Portugal to help review case evidence. He was accompanied by his "advanced dog" Eddie. Up until then, corpse-detection dogs had only ever been used in this country to help the police to locate human remains. Eddie the dog reportedly reacted to Mrs McCann's clothing. Almost overnight, the McCanns turned from victims into suspects, and the crowds who had surrounded them in support began to boo and jeer at them in the street. Seemingly as a result of the dog's reactions, the Portuguese police made the McCanns official suspects.

However, the accuracy of sniffer dogs is hugely exaggerated in the popular consciousness. Even the courts in England and Wales appear to have taken the reliability of the dog for granted. In Devon in 1999, the police were called to a house because a slice of fruitcake had been stolen from it. The police attended with a dog. The dog sniffed around the kitchen area and then appeared to follow a track 100m away from the house. The dog stopped and indicated at an abandoned car, in which a homeless man was sleeping. No fruitcake crumbs were found on the man or in the car. The man was interviewed and denied involvement. He said he had been sleeping rough in a barn. It was cold and he had found the car unlocked. He was convicted on the basis of the dog indication and inferences from his decision not to give evidence in court. In 2000 the Court of Appeal upheld his conviction for burglary.

In the US, scent line-ups are used. People have been convicted of robbery, rape, and even murder when the primary evidence against them is, in effect, a bark.

In fact, remarkably little is yet known about how the sense of smell works and there is a shocking shortage of reliable empirical research on the accuracy of detection dogs. The only substantial body of research was conducted in Australia. The Privacy Ombudsman of New South Wales reported its review on the use of drug-detection dogs to parliament in 2006. His research revealed that 74% of those searched following an indication by a dog were found not to be in possession of illegal drugs. This statistic adds weight to Justice Souter's statement that the "infallible dog" is a "legal fiction".

While many police dog handlers appear to hold a genuine belief in the "magic powers" of the dog (Russell Lee Ebersole was convicted of fraud for selling police officers in the US dogs said to be able to indicate which substances they were detecting by pointing their noses at letters of the alphabet), others are even more sanguine. A senior police dog handler told me that the dog's heightened olfactory sensitivity is not its only asset: "Admissions flow out of people indicated like a gush of air - they're so relieved not to have anything on them." A police sergeant who has received national recognition for his drug work laughs at the exaggerated portrayal of drug dogs' abilities in the street addict's mind: "They think they can detect drugs from 300m away!'

For now, the principal advantage of olfactory surveillance to police forces may reside in the nose's mysterious reputation for infallible detection. The police and security services are constantly on the lookout for technologies that can be used to justify hunches, coerce suspects into confessing and legitimise the use of force with something that can be labelled intelligence. Right now, smell fits the bill.

· Amber Marks is a criminal lawyer engaged in doctoral research on surveillance at King's College, London. Her book Headspace: On the Trail of Sniffer Dogs, Wasp Wardens and other Dumb Friends in the Surveillance Industry is published by Virgin, price £11.99.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2008/ ... ionalcrime

I found this particularly interesting as the novel I'm reading at present involves the use of tracker dogs.
 
Several police dog handlers attribute their dogs' knack for identifying criminals to an ability to detect the scent of fear emitted by the guilty

i imagine it's also quite effective with people who are afraid of doggy's :roll:

Scientists are undertaking research into how potential aggressors - or even, for instance, people with schizophrenia - might be identified by the odours they emit.

Um yes.. those too really belong in the same sentence don'y they?
 
I can remember a friend who'd never taken drugs in his life being pulled up by the police because their sniffer dog decided he was dodgy... perhaps he'd just been stood too close to someone who was having a joint at a gig, or maybe the dog was just plain having a brainfart that time.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Police sniffer dog dies of nose cancer after sniffing cocaine
A police drugs sniffer dog has died of a rare nose cancer after years sniffing cocaine during his work.

Last Updated: 11:41AM GMT 27 Jan 2009

Springer spaniel Max, aged nine, may have caught the disease because of the effect of cocaine and other drugs he was taught to detect.

Police Inspector Anne Higgins, the dog's owner, fears the training may have led to the disease which led to him being put down last week.

Max worked as a drugs dog with the Avon and Somerset police but lived with Insp Higgins, who is based at Tiverton police station in Devon.

She said: "It is ironic the wonderful organ that made him successful in his work has been his demise.

"It may or may not have been connected with what he used to do. Up until a couple of weeks ago he seemed fine and was doing well but it was an aggressive tumour.

"It was very hard to have him put down but we had to do it.

"I took him to the police station which he usually loved and was his favourite place but he did not show any reaction to being there and we knew he was not right.

"He was a fighter until the end and always very dignified. He has had a good life and a successful one as a police dog. Just think of all the bad people he managed to put away."

Max retired from police work last year after arthritis in his back legs led to him being fitted with a trolley so he could still run around.

Inspector Higgins said the cancer caused an infection in his front legs which threatened to leave him completely immobile.

Kate Fairclough, the dog's vet, his work may have caused his death from nasal cancer, which is rare in dogs.

She said: "Sniffing drugs may well have been a factor. I certainly cannot rule it out.

"Nose cancer in dogs is not at all common. It represents only one or two per cent of all cancers.

"It is difficult to know what caused it as there are so many different factors involved. Environmental factors can plat a part.

"He had done so well since 2006 when it was thought he would have to be put down so he had an extra three years of life.

"It is always hard to do and he was such a lovely dog."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstop ... caine.html
 
Coincidentally, in a crime novel, I just now came across a scene set in the NYPD firing range. There's a reference to the amount of lead residue there from the bullets. One character says: "..we were losing police dogs at a terrifying rate. Turns out they were absorbing lead through their paws."
 
rynner2 said:
Coincidentally, in a crime novel, I just now came across a scene set in the NYPD firing range. There's a reference to the amount of lead residue there from the bullets. One character says: "..we were losing police dogs at a terrifying rate. Turns out they were absorbing lead through their paws."

WTF were the police dogs doing at the firing range? Retrieveing bullets?
 
ramonmercado said:
WTF were the police dogs doing at the firing range? Retrieveing bullets?
It doesn't say, but I'd guess it was part of their training to get acclimatised to the sound of gunfire.
 
I'm not convinced about the cause of the dog's nose cancer. The sniffer dogs don't actually come into contact with any drugs so it's not that.

Perhaps the dogs're sniffing around unsavoury areas, around chemicals and pollutants.
 
rynner2 said:
ramonmercado said:
WTF were the police dogs doing at the firing range? Retrieveing bullets?
It doesn't say, but I'd guess it was part of their training to get acclimatised to the sound of gunfire.

I guess they were gundogs.
 
escargot1 said:
I'm not convinced about the cause of the dog's nose cancer. The sniffer dogs don't actually come into contact with any drugs so it's not that.
In order to smell anything, molecules from the thing sniffed have to enter the nose and fit into receptors there. So possibly over time a dog could accumulate quite a dose...?
 
rynner2 said:
escargot1 said:
I'm not convinced about the cause of the dog's nose cancer. The sniffer dogs don't actually come into contact with any drugs so it's not that.
In order to smell anything, molecules from the thing sniffed have to enter the nose and fit into receptors there. So possibly over time a dog could accumulate quite a dose...?

Or maybe the dog kept a portion for his own use from each drug haul.
 
Or maybe the dog kept a portion for his own use from each drug haul

It remind me of an episode of Family guy where brian, the dog, becomes a sniffer dog at the airport and becomes addicted to coke.
 
Police confidence in sniffer dogs affords them an instantaneous "probable cause" (to search, etc.), regardless of whether the dog is accurately reacting to contraband. Here's the story of a sniffer dog that gave its handlers constant "probable cause" guidance by reacting positively in 100% of its checks. Other sniffer dogs have proven to be prone to false positives as well.
The Police Dog Who Cried Drugs at Every Traffic Stop

Cops laugh about “probable cause on four legs” but the damage to innocent lives is real.

Don't blame Karma. The police dog simply followed his training when he helped local agencies impound vehicles that sometimes belonged to innocent motorists in Republic, Washington, an old mining town near the Canadian border.

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.

Whether drivers actually possessed illegal narcotics made no difference. The government gained access to every vehicle that Karma ever sniffed. He essentially created automatic probable cause for searches and seizures, undercutting constitutional guarantees of due process.

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.

Despite the frequent errors, courts typically treat certified narcotics dogs as infallible, allowing law enforcement agencies to use them like blank permission slips to enter vehicles, open suitcases, and rummage through purses. ...
FULL STORY: https://reason.com/2021/05/13/the-police-dog-who-cried-drugs-at-every-traffic-stop/
 
Police confidence in sniffer dogs affords them an instantaneous "probable cause" (to search, etc.), regardless of whether the dog is accurately reacting to contraband. Here's the story of a sniffer dog that gave its handlers constant "probable cause" guidance by reacting positively in 100% of its checks. Other sniffer dogs have proven to be prone to false positives as well.

FULL STORY: https://reason.com/2021/05/13/the-police-dog-who-cried-drugs-at-every-traffic-stop/
Imagine being randomly stopped and accused of an illegal activity because a dog said so.
 
Dogs say whatever pleases their masters, -even if they know they arent going to get a reward more than praise.

And praise is a valid reward to dogs

They are great liars...But humans are conditioned to trust what a dog says.
 
Here's an operational side-effect of marijuana legalization. Sniffer dogs trained to alert when they detect illegal drugs - including marijuana - are essentially obsolete because they're triggering on something that's no longer considered probable or actual cause for officer action.
Since the nose doesn’t know pot is now legal, K-9s retire

Asking dogs to follow their noses won’t work anymore in states that have legalized marijuana.

As Virginia prepares to legalize adult possession of up to an ounce of marijuana on July 1, drug-sniffing police dogs from around the state are being forced into early retirement, following a trend in other states where legalization has led to K-9s being put out to pasture earlier than planned. ...

Virginia state police are retiring 13 K-9s, while many smaller police departments and sheriff’s offices are retiring one or two dogs. Most are in the process of purchasing and training new dogs to detect only illicit drugs, including cocaine, heroin and methamphetamines. Some departments are unable to afford up to $15,000 to buy and train a new dog, so they are disbanding their K-9 units. ...

The dogs trained on multiple drugs alert in the same way for all of them, so it’s impossible to tell whether they are indicating the presence of marijuana or an illicit drug. The dogs also cannot distinguish between a small, legal amount of marijuana or a larger, still-illegal amount of the drug. For police, that means they can no longer be used to establish probable cause for a search. ...

Other states that legalized marijuana earlier have had to make similar adjustments. ...
FULL STORY: https://apnews.com/article/va-state...legalization-253af1ba6e541060085108e027b367c1
 
Allegedly genuine video of a man teasing his pet, an ex-police dog retired after being stabbed:


maximus otter
 
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