Police Dog Accused of Racial Profiling
Can dogs really discriminate between white and black people in making decisions to be more aggressive to one group and not the other?
IANA dog expert, but I don’t think dogs can be trained to discriminate between different human skin colors. I mean, how would you go about it? You can train a dog to “go for the person holding a gun”, or to “go for the person who’s standing up”, but in all the books on dog training I’ve read, I’ve never heard anything about “go for the black guy”. Or “go for the Chinese guy”.
For that matter, I don’t think you can even train dogs to discriminate between men and women. It’s always “go for the person holding the gun”, or “go for the person designated by the handler”.
I’ve been puttering around on Google for a bit, and the only references I can find to things like “dog training attack blacks” are either stories about a handler setting a dog (or dogs) on blacks (“go for the designated person”), or borderline ULs about South Africa’s apartheid “wolf-dogs” that were supposedly trained to attack blacks (again, it sounds like “go for the designated person”).
Here’s an interesting article: What Do Dogs See?
Color Vision
Was the suspect in this case caucasian? The article doesn’t say.
dogs operate on smell more that vision as we operate on vision more than smell. black folk smell alot diffenently than white folks. if a human can detect the difference in smell. it must be glaring to a dog. the particulars of the incident are what is important . if a dog sees its master in a fight it goes into a defend/attack mode. I have seen it and it aint pretty.I just hope the poor dog dosent get put down.
Cite?
(Spelling? Grammar?)
<< black folk smell alot diffenently than white folks. >>
First, NO, black folk smell with their noses just as white folk do, they do not smell differently (that is, with some othe mechanism.)
Second, assuming you mean that black folk smell different from white folk, then NO, this is an old (racist) myth. Cite: Bergen Evans, Natural History of Nonsense.
It’s not a myth. Everyone smells different. I’m not sure about generally black vs white but you go to a different person’s house adn tell me their house doesn’t have a distinct smell.
Black folk look different then white folk, It makes sense that there might be some small difference in smell. Dogs operate by smell and search for drugs for smell so I have to assume this dog is very good at detecting smell due to nature and training.
Cite : Police Dog Accused of Racial Profiling (link at top in OP)
Also typically the diet of blacks vs. whites are different which WILL account for different odors.
I don’t know about Natural History of Nonsense but I have seen lots of stuff trying to prove things that would make them more PC, most proof is dubious at best.
Unfortunately I’m unable to find any cite, but I have read an account of an experiment in which subjects who could smell but not see a number of people wrapped in sheets were invited to identify them by race.
The subjects were unable to distinguish between races by smell. There was no difference in results between a group of subjects who beleived that races did smell differently, and a group which did not have that belief.
That’s not to say, of course, that dogs, who have a much more developed sense of smell, might not be able to distinguish between races by smell.
In this PC nation anything that proves or even infers that there are differences in races is labeled racist and dismissed while anything that proves that the races are similar if not he same is held up as written in stone even if totally false.
Just look the NJ racial profiling. Black drivers were pulled over more then white drivers for speeding on the NJT. They charged racial profiling. The US DoJ did a study and found that blacks were 6x more likely to speed then whites and they were afraid to release the study.
This is the environment we live in so when you hear something like there is no difference in smell between blacks and whites you have to wonder is it science or PC crap. And why I question ** C K Dexter Haven
**'s cite.
Also I would say that whites and blacks probably actually smell (things) differently too as there respective diets are different so their food preferences are different and smell is a large part of taste.
Another possiblility is that the dog isn’t racist, but its master is. More than once, I’ve heard that the handlers of those dogs can give some kind of signal that they want the dog to “hit” on a particular person or thing, regardless of whether the dog smells anything suspicious. So it could be that the dog’s handler is targeting blacks, but the dog is taking the blame.
… I’ve known people who claim that their dogs don’t like black people. Granted, the owner would probably be considered to be racist by most folks, even without the dog.
“Also I would say that whites and blacks probably actually smell (things) differently too as there respective diets are different so their food preferences are different and smell is a large part of taste.”
Diets are different? Well, maybe. I suppose few traditionally African-descended families have good Eastern European recipies. Still, I don’t think this is an issue. es, different colors of people have certain differences, but this is mostly sub-cultural, not genetic, and are usually overstated. The real problem here, however, is one of degree - think about how many “white” or “black” people have ancestors in the last 400 years who didn’t come from Europe of Africa, respectively.
It’s an interesting question, one I imagine will get sent to Great Debates.
For what it’s worth, it doesn’t seem outrageous to me that a dog could distinguish between blacks and whites. Maybe not as well as a person, though.
And as suggested by other posters, it could be an illusion created by dietary preferences in the black community or more popular brands of deoderant or cologne.
It also seems possible that a dog could judge race by color - you can’t tell me that a dog can’t distinguish between dark and light. Of course there may be other visual clues.
Of course, I agree that in some cases, dogs may be acting on the cues of their masters.
I agree with Diceman that dogs can be trained to attack blacks on a signal from its racist master. But the story in the OP implies the K-9 officer was involved in a struggle, so it doesn’t seem the handler would have had the opportunity to tell the dog to attack a 9-year witnessing the struggle.
In regards to smell: while their may be no difference in naturally body oders between blacks and whites, a racist handler may target specific products that are more common in the black population. I’ve walked by black men who had their hair coated with some hair-straighening gel. It smelled disgusting. I realize that not all blacks use such products, and same whites may. But if a racist dog owner walked by this same black man and was disgusted by the smell, he/she might decide to use that disgusting smelling crap as a training aid. While this example is a little extreme, this might be the approach someone could use in training an animal to be racist.
Also, if they can train a dog to go for the person with the gun, couldn’t they just as easily train the dog to go for the person in the really baggy pants with the crotch down to the knees. Again, this is not a black-exclusive characteristic on which to judge, but a truly racist handler may feel that white kids wearing baggy pants have been “tainted by the [racist epithet here]” and, therefore, anyone wearing baggy pants is worthy of punishment.
I realize my examples aren’t perfect, I’m just trying to point out the trainers may use things other than skin color or natural body smell to teach the dog to attack blacks.
Or, playing devil’s advocate here, maybe the dog was just doing its job. Possibly the kid had the smell of drugs on him. This is not intended as a blanket statement against blacks; I’m not saying that because he was black, the 9-year-old boy dealt with drugs. I’m just saying the story doesn’t provide enough information to rule that possibility out. The same is true of the other 3 blacks mentioned in the story. The article doesn’t say they were involved in drugs (though it did say the other 3 were), it didn’t say they weren’t. If the dog only attacks blacks, but every black attacked was involved with drugs–that would not be racism, that would be a well trained dog.
Okay, attack me now. (But please don’t compare me to Barking Spider.)
I said:
The original story says:
So I was refering to the “three other were blacks who believe the dog jumped at or attacked them because of their race.” when I said the article didn’t say they weren’t involved in drugs.
I’m sure the author of the article (attributed to the AP) would have mentioned drug involvment for the second 3 men if it was known. But we cannot rule out that possiblity based on what information is provided in the article.
Again, I’m not trying to be racist, I’m simply trying to be logical. If you feel my logic is faulty, please attack me at that level. Don’t call me a racist.
Thank you for your participation.
Some dogs do indeed differentiate between whites and blacks, and my experience indicates there’s no reason to ascribe it to anything other than vision. I remember in particular a dog who was kept in a fenced area along a sidewalk in a commercial part of town, who would ignore white folks passing by on the sidewalk but run up to the fence and bark at black folks. This dog was sometimes more than 20 feet away from the sidewalk, in an area with plenty of auto exhaust in the air. If it were at all possible for him to detect a person’s scent–which I seriously doubt–one would expect him to start barking when people were close enough, even if they weren’t visible. That was not the pattern. It was clear from observing him that he reacted when someone came into his sight.
It’s a clear given in many dog-rearing books that dogs can distinguish between race/gender/age etc. They suggest when you are socializing a dog to be sure to expose it to all races, ages, genders, etc. A dog that has never been around black people will tend to be suspicious of them, one that has never been around wheelchairs will be suspicious of them, etc. Just about everyone knows about a rescued dog that is normally extremely friendly, but gets scared and acts out when around men with beards, or older guys with low voices, fat people, etc.
This casts the OP in a different light. A dog doesn’t have to be specifially trained to attack black people. If it is socialized with white people, then it will tend to be more worked up around non-white people.
Along the same lines, if the black people it is exposed are all the criminals of the world, and the white people are the friendly citizenry, then that will tend to warp it’s perspective.
I think muttrox is right on. Much of it does have to do with training, and what factors the dogs are taught to to take as cues for suspicious behavior.
My family owned a police dog (German Shepherd) when I was growing up. Achmed (the dog) was extremely intelligent, and had been rigorously trained to treat people whose faces were covered as suspicious-- the point of this training was to get Achmed to be on alert for suspects fleeing, trying to hide, wearing masks, etc. A somewhat unfortunate side effect was the Achmed was, by extension, also suspicious of men with beards or mustaches, or people wearing hats low enough on their heads to hide their eyes. We had a hedge around our front yard that drove Achmed crazy because he couldn’t fully see the people walking by. He was a dog that more or less required people to let him get a read on them as the very first thing-- that meant facing him, not moving quickly, and not covering your face. He would do an instant read, but anyone who ran away, or “charged” him, or again, covered their face, Achmed would bark angrily and maybe try to pin.
I’m actually going somewhere with this. Along with being socialized (i.e., exposed to different types of people), police dogs in particular are definitely trained to be vigilant against specific traits. This case may be a result of the dog’s trainers making the dog go against black people. Or, it could be a case of the dog making his own decisions about who was acting suspicious-- if the boy was moving away quickly (fleeing, to the dog), looked/smelled scared, or had his features covered in any way (a hat), it could be the dog took all these things to mean that this boy was his target. People’s faces are a key factor in how dogs read people. If the dog was not properly trained to read dark faces, again, it might have made its own decision about the boy’s.
No matter what, it sounds like a poorly trained, new dog. Achmed was trained to pin suspects-- he bit clothing only, never skin. He held people down with his own weight, paws on shoulders, and did not allow the suspect to move, but certainly never dragged the suspect once he had them.