since9
Campaign Veteran
But I rarely see non-LEO with a gun that's not a criminal.
I've seen hundreds of non-LEOs with a gun. All of them were OCing, and none of them were criminals (or if they were, they weren't engaged in criminal activity at the time). Many were hunters, most of them were simply at a shooting range, and perhaps a total of 25 I've met at various OC meets.
Come to think of it, I've never seen a non-LEO with a gun who was a criminal (or engaged in criminal activity).
The problem is our confusion about when dogs are picking up a scent and when they are responding to cues from their handlers.
and
The other 123 searches produced an astounding 225 alerts, every one of them false. Even more interesting, the search points designed to trick the handlers (marked by the red slips of paper) were about twice as likely to trigger false alerts as the search points designed to trick the dogs (by luring them with sausages). [/i]
(bold mine)
While a handler's unconscious cues may very well be resulting in false positives during double-blind scientific studies, in the real world, false positives may not be false at all. The dog's scent is strong enough to detect the presense of drugs, even after the drugs have been removed. So, of the 56% of hits which turned out not to have contraband, how many of those were the result of handler cues, and how many were the result of the dogs detecting the odor of drugs which had previously been in the vehicle?
To date, no test has been devised to distinguish variances between handler cues and "false" positives where the dog hit on an actual scent.
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