How Do Your Train a Dog to Lie?

When you lie on your resume but still get the job

How do you train a dog to lie?

Let’s start with a simple question: How do you train a *human* to lie? 

If your answer is to regularly reward them for lying, and then rarely and only weakly punish them when they are caught, you are right. 

So, when a police officer routinely perjures herself in court, and is not punished, but is in fact rewarded for lying, she is being trained to lie. 

When this same person lies and gets a lucrative job with status and a big paycheck, and her bosses wink at her lies, she is being taught to lie. 

These are real examples recently detailed on this blog. 

But lying by police is not rare or exceptional, as we have all seen with our own eyes thanks to the advent of cell phone cameras. 

As noted earlier, lying is considered a core competency of police work. Lying is taught in police academies, the law specifically allows the police to lie, and courts and top leadership rarely punish lying by police, even in depositions and court appearances. 

 In police work, nearly every signal and incentive encourages false searches, arrests, and incident escalation through lying. Lying is almost never punished. 

But what about dogs? Surely the *dogs* don’t lie? 

But they do. 

In fact, police routinely TRAIN dogs to lie. 

How do you train a dog to lie? 

Simple: the same way you train a police officer to lie. 

Job One, of course, would be to train the dog to do a job, such as locate marijuana. 

 How do you do that? Well food and play rewards are certainly important, absent any natural internal drive. So first you train the dog to get a reward by marking for marijuana.  In short, you PAY the dog a “jackpot” when they do the work you want. 

Now, how would you train a dog to lie? Simple: reward the dog for doing a fake approximation of the work, and never punish the dog for false marking. 

 In short, give the dog play, food, and affection regardless of the outcome, and rarely or only weakly “punish” them for false marking. 

Is this done with police dogs? 

 All the time. 

In Utah thing are so bad the courts have said EVERY police drug dog in that state is unreliable. 

The TechDirt web site explains why cops love canine drug search unreliability and why they have a training program that fosters it: 

Cops love drug dogs because they allow cops to perform the warrantless searches they want to perform. The drug dog's handler can call literally any movement by the dog an ‘alert,’ turning normal dog behavior into ‘probable cause’ for a search. It doesn't help that the dogs are rewarded for every alert and given no positive reinforcement for failing to find anything interesting.

Read the whole thing, including the court opinion.

So do police lie? Yep — like birds fly. 

And are police dogs blank slates and honest brokers who are only trained to tell the truth? 

 Nope. Not for one second. 

For police and police dogs, lying is a core competency of the job, baked into both the formal training and the day-to-day work. 

To be clear, not *all* cops lie (at least not all the time) and not *every* police department is training dogs to lie. 

But is that the way to bet? 

Sure. 

It’s why *every* police officer should have a functioning body camera, why every *honest* police officer should be encouraging others to film their interactions with the public. 

But most cops are at least a little bent, which is why most police departments *hate* cameras and/or do not summarily fire police officers who happen to have “camera failure” just as they happen to be shooting and assaulting an unarmed civilian or protester. 

The bottom line is you get what you incentivize and what you fail to punish. With police and dogs, it’s no different.