It’s Not Accuracy They Want…
…it’s authority. And fangs.
The day will come when drug-hunting dogs will seem as cruel as human-hunting dogs, tout court. Because that is, ultimately, what they are.
by Jason Kuznicki · January 6, 2011
…it’s authority. And fangs.
The day will come when drug-hunting dogs will seem as cruel as human-hunting dogs, tout court. Because that is, ultimately, what they are.
Jason Kuznicki
Jason Kuznicki is a research fellow at the Cato Institute and contributor of Cato Unbound. He's on twitter as JasonKuznicki. His interests include political theory and history.
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[caption id="attachment_361266" align="alignnone" width="640"] Screengrab from WIVB Buffalo Channel 4 News[/caption]
Still a developing story, but what we know so far points to an utterly depraved act of violence at a Buffalo supermarket.
Comment →Ten people were killed and three others suffered non-life-threatening injuries and were transported to local hospitals after a mass shooting at a supermarket on Buffalo’s East Side Saturday afternoon.
The shooter was an 18-year-old white male who was heavily armed with tactical gear and was live-streaming during the mass shooting, officials said. City of Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown said the shooter is not from Buffalo and traveled “hours” from outside the area.
“This was pure evil,” Erie County Sheriff John Garcia said. “A straight-up racially motivated hate crime.”
The shooter was identified in court Saturday evening as Payton S. Gendron of Conklin, New York, about 200 miles southeast of Buffalo.
Gendron was arraigned on one count of first-degree murder without bail.
The 18-year-old will be back in court on Thursday at 9:30 a.m. for a felony hearing.
When Gendron exited his vehicle at the supermarket, authorities said, he shot four people in the parking lot. Three of them died and one is in the hospital. The shooter entered the store and opened fire on customers.
Twitch deletes shooter’s live-stream video of Buffalo mass shooting
A retired Buffalo Police officer, Aaron Salter, who was working as a security guard, shot Gendron but he was unharmed because he was wearing armor, Gramaglia said. The retired officer was shot and killed.A law enforcement source told CBS News that the gunman had a racial slur written on his weapon. The attack is being treated as a hate crime.
Erie County District Attorney John Flynn will not confirm the existence of the shooter’s manifesto. He said they believe there was a “racial component” to the attack but won’t say more.
This attack is being investigated by the FBI as a hate crime and as violent extremism.
Police officers could frame people, file bogus charges, conjure evidence out of thin air—and, in most of the U.S., they would still be immune from facing any sort of civil accountability for that malicious prosecution. Until yesterday.
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Yesterday, the highest court in the country struck that requirement down, ruling that Thompson should indeed have a right to sue the officers at the center of his case. "A plaintiff such as Thompson must demonstrate, among other things, that he obtained a favorable termination of the underlying criminal prosecution," wrote Justice Brett Kavanaugh for the U.S. Supreme Court. "We hold that a Fourth Amendment claim…for malicious prosecution does not require the plaintiff to show that the criminal prosecution ended with some affirmative indication of innocence."
From THOMPSON v. CLARK ET AL.:
Held: To demonstrate a favorable termination of a criminal prosecution for purposes of the Fourth Amendment claim under §1983 for malicious prosecution, a plaintiff need not show that the criminal prosecution ended with some affirmative indication of innocence. A plaintiff need only show that his prosecution ended without a conviction.
Thompson has satisfied that requirement here.
Thompson v. Clark was decided 6-3. (Alito wrote the dissent, with Thomas and Gorsuch joining.)
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Recently comments that included the strings "zed" or "doug" were sent immediately to trash. This should be fixed now.
I hate to be a nudge but after tutoring statistics off and on for years the ‘coin’ analogy here is a bit irksome.
Let’s say out of 100 cars 10 are carrying drugs. Now imagine a dog who barks at 5 cars carrying drugs and not at any of the others. We’d say casually this dog is ‘always right’, is 100%. But he isn’t.
Likewise consider a dog that barks at 20 cars catching the 10 that have drugs but also barking at 10 other ‘false positives’. The article says this dog is no better than flipping a coin since he is wrong 50% of the time. But he isn’t. He catches 100% of the drug smuggling cars. A coin flip would generate 45 false positives, 5 true positives catching only 50% of the smugglers.
I’m not saying a dog with so many false positives is acceptable but we should keep both sides of the coin in mind. The 2nd type of dog may be more desirable when the stakes are much higher, say a bomb sniffing dog where you want zero people with bombs to get through.
In terms of probable cause, the 2nd type of dog has lots of false positives BUT that doesn’t mean his barks are no better than coin flips. If he barks at you the odds are still greater that you’re carrying drugs.Report
So, the piece of information we lack is: What percent of traffic stops did dogs trigger off of? Your examples may be in the right ballpark, but we can’t assume that. Drug-sniffing dogs don’t sit in every traffic police vehicle. They may be summoned when the traffic cop suspects something is fishy. So, drug dogs may be triggering on more than 50% of all stops. The article quotes Justice Souter writing that some dogs in testing do as poorly as identifying 60% of clean cars has containing drugs. (This would be even more useful information if we knew how many true positives these hyper-triggering dogs detected.)
Anyway, you’re absolutely right that the dogs may be doing much better than coin flips. But your last sentence is incorrect: You don’t know that the vast majority of all sniffs result in negatives from the dogs, and this assumption is necessary for that statement to be true.Report
And in point of fact we have “human-hunting dogs”–scent trackers.Report
Well sure. I just find it inhumane to use them in hunting addicts.Report