The cops love them because they're basically a living version of the huge maglite flashlight; uncooperative subject being a general pain in the ass holed up somewhere? Send in the dog, that'll teach 'em!
They're also a breathing probable cause generator.
Drug dogs are worse than a coin flip for correctly signaling on drugs (I don't know about explosives or the 'flash drive' dogs and yes, the latter is A Thing) but I wouldn't be surprised if the latter were also BS.
The dogs are extremely eager to please, and they can pick up on cues from their handler that the handler thinks there are drugs.
The US Supreme Court ruled they're constitutional regardless of being worse than random, which at the time was one of the more perplexing rulings by the court. It gave cops free license to bypass a constitutional right.
The police have been using drug dogs, which are known to have only a 30% hit rate, as an excuse to strip-search teens on their way into music festivals, despite there also being evidence that young people in possession of drugs tend to give them up when told the dog has indicated on them. And they haven't even been properly recording their 'justification' for the searches.
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/may/13/nsw-p...
Here's hoping they get a smackdown from the courts. The NSW police seem to be the worst in Australia for this and are basically killing the music festival scene in that state, through a campaign of harassment and charging extortionate, mandatory fees to public events.
It is a photo of NYPD. Some of the officers are wearing their vests over their uniforms and some aren't. There are also some wearing jackets.
- The black officer's hands in the back are "possibly weird until you zoom in" - it's just the shadow/low-light hiding his pinky.
- outfits all different.... that's... fine?
- "bunch of other weird details"... downvoted because you didn't even try...
Every one that I've seen (which is several, but a long way from comprehensive—there are a hell of a lot of them) features the main characters frequently and deliberately violating suspects' rights, both Constitutional and otherwise, in order to get the evidence that they "know" has to be there, with widely varying degrees of ostensible justification being provided.
2 retail workers in the last 2 weeks have told me about thefts happening in their stores where someone loads up a cart with merchandise and rolls it out the door. It doesn't mean that society is crumbling or that we need police to be more vicious, but I think there is something going on and it would be worthwhile to address it somehow. It feels corrosive to the fabric of society when this stuff happens. Maybe not as corrosive as cops beating and killing people, but it's also bad.
My pet theory is that the #1 problem in the USA in the past few decades is wealth inequality, and if we can find ways to stop the rich extracting wealth from the poor, many of our issues will sort themselves out.
It's much simpler. People notice they can just take things with no consequences...so they do.
i feel i can get a quicker read on people listening to them rather than reading something carefully crafted. I searched and listened to this
I don't understand how you can tell this story, pivot to a discussion of people who you feel selectively report statistics, and then never get back to the obvious question of whether crime rates decreased after these policy responses. (They did, significantly, and in some hot spots like San Francisco quite a lot: https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/sf-crime-decline-c...)
>The evidence of the root causes of interpersonal harm—like that marshaled by the Kerner Commission, which studied U.S. crime in 1968 and recommended massive social investment to reduce inequality—is ignored.
A good point, but criminals still must face consequences for their actions.
>And the cycle continues: moral panic is followed by calls for more police surveillance, militarization, higher budgets for prosecutors and prisons, and harsher sentencing. Because none of these things affect violence too much, the problems continue.
That's just nonsense.
throw0101d•2h ago
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copaganda