This here is the link to the documentation.
I had assumed that the radius parameter would've taken in the following value (radius I want to search)/(radius of the earth). Since that is how I had been converting the output of the tree.query method into a distance I can use.
However the results that come out of it don't make any sense, which is why I was hoping someone would clarify what this parameter expects as an input since the docs weren't very clear.