As usual, I was running late to work this morning. As I tried to beat the crowd getting off of my train up the escalator to Penn Station, I literally ran into what I think was a bomb-sniffing dog being guided by a police officer. This dog’s mouth was basically in my crotch for a split second. It was quite the wake-up call (probably for him too).
Let’s just say for the sake of argument, that I had a bag of coke or weed hidden in my crotch at the time. Would the dog have been able to detect it? This is obviously hypothetical. If it wasn’t, I’d already know the answer.
I don’t think so. I’ve watched a few shows about “-sniffing” dogs and they’re trained to sniff out a specific scent and react -either sit and/or bark. It takes a lot of training to get them to react to their specific scents so I would guess that it’s better to have a dog focusing on bomb scents (because there’s more than one) or drug scents (also more than one).
Trained scent dogs do not react to scents because they’re react-able or because they’re “bad”, but because they’re trained for a specific job and are looking for specific scents. You could train a dog to react to peanut butter and it wouldn’t react to jelly. Same thing with bombs vs. drugs.
I’ve worked with a number of police dogs. Some are trained to detect scents associated with explosives. Some are trained to detect common illicit drugs. Some are trained for crowd control. Some are trained for search and rescue stuff.
Also, their abilities vary. I attended a program that displayed the abilities of dogs from all over the east coast. Some dogs could barely find a baggie with an ounce of weed in a guy’s pocket, while others could find a joint shrink wrapped repeatedly in heavy gauge plastic, then hidden in a car’s upholstery.
As above. They run different dogs through campus depending on what they are looking for. I asked the handler if the standard “drug” dog would freak if he got a whiff of my truck after I’d been at the range. He said negative. But that the weapons dog would, so I need to make sure there is nothing left in my truck after a shoot that might cause me a hassle at school.
Some dogs are even trained to sniff for fruits and vegetables. I used to work for TSA and next door was US Customs and they would bring their little dog over for us to pet sometimes and they said he was a fruit dog. lol
Slight sidetrack… does anyone know why we don’t do the same level of screening on trains as they do on airplanes? While a terrorist might not be able to “take down” an entire train with one bomb, as we have learned from Madrid you can cause quite a lot of damage and kill dozens of people on a train with a well placed bomb. And I suppose if your bomb was powerful enough, and you timed the explosion perfectly, you could probably take out most of a train station packed with commuters.
So why don’t we check for bombs on trains like we do on planes? Is it just too expensive? Does something horrible have to happen in the US before we realize our vulnerability?
It seems that the question of canine detection has been answered, so I’d like to chime in about a specific electromechanical method. Both illicit drugs and energetic materials are of similar composition (organic, with lots of hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen [aka CHON molecules]). The biggest difference on the molecular level is the relative density of the two classes.
One type of machine (common in airports) concentrates a sample by swabbing a material or puffing air over it and catching it in a filter, dissolves the sample with some type of organic solvent, and then puts the resulting mixture through a GCMS (gas chromatograph mass spectrometer). At this point, it only requires a preprogrammed pattern to trigger an alert, and false positives are relatively rare.
Also, in case of terrorists, SWAT can simply drive to the train, while plane is isolated until landing/crashing.
Also, easy access works both ways. No sense to go all out with all security measures when you can simply put bomb on the tracks. Or throw one at the train.
Well, I think the way to answer that is to ask why we don’t screen for bombs at other places: after all, if you wanted to kill a few dozen people, you don’t need a train or plane, you could set off a bomb in a stadium, political rally, nightclub, Walk for Hunger, subway, or line of people waiting to get through security at an airport. So even if we could perfectly keep bombs off of trains, it wouldn’t stop a determined bomber. Since there’s no way to effectively keep possible bombs out of all possible targets, there’s really not much point in trying to keep them off of trains, which costs money and hassle for passengers.
You might logically then ask: So if there’s no point in screening train passengers why are we spending lots of money and hassle screening airline passengers? And the answer of course is ‘people are scared and want to see Something Done, and don’t care if it really does anything.’ Since people are scared of flying anyway, that’s where the bulk of Security Theater is deployed.
Also, while you could kill dozens of people by bombing a train, you could also kill dozens by bombing a shopping mall, or a busy city intersection. We simply can’t have heavy security everywhere.
