A lot of police publicity shows us, the members of the public, just how good police dogs are at doing their job. We are often shown examples of how uncannily accurate police dogs are in sniffing out drugs or firearms or explosives. We marvel at how these four-legged plod do their jobs without whining (as much as their handlers that is), claiming overtime, taking excessive sick leave, practising their Masonic handshakes, nicking people for criticising ideologies, fitting up members of the public or even beating a newspaper seller to death.
But how accurate are these dogs really? We’ve seen the police reality shows where the dog always finds the contraband or the fugitive but what are the figures for ‘false positives’ when dogs are used to search? If we are supposedly relying on these dogs to help for example in preventing Abdul’s latest terror outrage, should we not know how accurate these dogs are?
The figure, according to the Crimebodge site is an astounding 75% of false positives for dog searches. That’s potentially a lot of Abdul’s explosive alchemy that could be being missed if the explosive seeking dogs have anything like this level of accuracy.
Maybe we shouldn’t be relying so much on dogs to defend us against Abdul the Terrorist and his sweating, ticking, exploding rucksack? If four legged animals with only a 25% accuracy rate are the front line of defence against terror then I now feel a lot less safe when travelling on certain types of public transport. How many false positives are being checked out by officers while the real bomber or Mumbai type attacker could walk on unhindered towards their target?
Crimebodge said:
“Did you know that a dog’s sense of smell is – on average – 5,000 times more sensitive than a human’s?
And that one third of it’s brain is dedicated to smelling?
But even with such olfactory super-powers almost 75% of positive detections made by these canine informants turn out to be WRONG.
With our UK police so fixated on petty and vindictive arrests, it pays to ensure that you don’t fall prey to these clueless, tongue lolling mammals…
And their dogs.”
Read the rest at: http://crimebodge.com/fool-a-sniffer-dog/
A false positive is 100 times better than a false negative.
Dogs are an aid, NOT the final solution.
They may falsley indicate that a package contains drugs or explosives, but they do NOT falsley indicate that they do NOT.
I agree a false positive is preferable but my concern is that while the officers are searching to check whether or not a false pos has occurred a real bomber could be marching through. The number of times I’ve come through stations where one or more officers are busy dealing with an alleged positive reading whilst I, who could be someone with contraband or whatever, have sailed strait past the now busy officers.
I agree that dogs are an aide but the police have oversold the accuracy of them to the general public.
I kind of agree.
They are also only useful for about 10 to 20 minutes, after which their noses are kanckered. They then need a good hour, to hour and a half, before they can be used again.