alt Hacker NewsThe best example of Copaganda or Copraganda are police dogs. The public love them, think they're cute.
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.
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I've never heard of dogs sniffing for electronics https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/feb/24/dog-can-sni...
"PC on four legs".
This is going throught the courts in New South Wales, Australia, right now.
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.