California is considering banning police dogs.
I’m woefully ignorant about the pros and cons. If you have an opinion, would you mind sharing it here so that I can be better educated.
Thanks in advance.
Why is California proposing this?
Apparently the suggested legislation is only for certain uses of police dogs (e.g. crowd control) and is largely because there are allegations that some dogs have been trained to attack black people.
I think dogs serve a bunch of uses in police work that can’t really be replaced. Many based on their fabulous noses: they sniff out drugs, can track criminals and lost kids, find cadavers or unconscious injured victims and so forth.
Honestly, I was wondering if this was being promoted by something like PeTA claiming police work was cruel to the dogs.
Dogs are an effective tool for crowd control, but if their use is racially biased that’s a problem. What evidence is there that this is the case? I could not read the entire article without a subscription.
Yes, the local police use dogs for search and rescue and finding cadavers (the now-retired handler and her dog went to NYC to dig through the 9-11 rubble). Law enforcement at customs uses dogs to search for drugs and illegally imported meat. I’d much prefer having a dog sniff my suitcase to having people open it up and grope through it. I hope they aren’t banning those uses.
That article is actually fairly decent journalism as these things go today. Here are a few quotes that indicate the motive for the proposal.
Injuries caused by police canines made up nearly 12% of the police use-of-force incidents that led to serious injury or death statewide in 2021…
Black and Latino people accounted for about two-thirds of the use-of-force cases involving canines.
The Los Angeles Police Department’s canine unit was launched in 1980. By the end of the decade it was inflicting hundreds of bites a year, … Critics said the LAPD was using dogs with abandon in poor and nonwhite neighborhoods, dispatching them more frequently in those areas and injuring far more Black and Latino people than white people.
And regarding other uses…
The bill would not ban using police canines for explosives detection, search and rescue or narcotics detection, which don’t involve biting.
It says: The bill would not ban using police canines for explosives detection, search and rescue or narcotics detection, which don’t involve biting.
And also that police dogs bite and injure a lot of people. Okay, that makes a lot of sense.
If we’re talking about banning K9s from searching cars on traffic stops because the officer couldn’t get consent from the driver to search their car; I’m all for it.
That sketchy practice should have stopped a long time ago.
Heck, why dont we ban batons from the police, too? They are used to subdue Black and Latino people all the time and probably cause injuries.
The same argument could be said about any tool police use. The dogs are just a tool, a tool at the control of police. If some police are mis-using the tool, perhaps better training is needed as opposed to a ban?
They’ve improved
By the early 1990s, the LAPD began to reform its canine policies, and bites fell from 350 a year to about 35, according to the Times report.
Maybe we should. I’d ban guns from police, first.
We could ban racism. Then we wouldn’t have to ban the dogs. Just a suggestion.
Well, “tools” don’t have powerful unions or qualified immunity. So sometimes it’s easier to get rid of the tool.
If the batons themselves are deciding to hit Black and Latino people, then maybe we should. The problem with police dogs is that they can be trained, intentionally or not, to be hostile against people of specific races.
(This isn’t the dogs’ fault, of course. They’re just following their masters’ lead).
Yes, this is where I was going. Revise training of both cops and dogs to be less racist. The dogs fill an important function, IMHO, for public safety - entering situations too sketchy for people and bringing them to quick resolution. Yes, the dogs can be mis-used and that needs to be fixed, but I’d rather have the dogs getting shot and stabbed during a pursuit than people.
I wonder how that correlates to the percentage of Black and Latino people who commit crimes vs. the percentage of others who commit crimes.
I think it should happen everywhere. And that anyone being mauled by one in any situation has the moral right to kill it in self-defense.
Also, this case.
In case you miss it in the story, the thug cops laughed and joked about their thug dog getting “a bite” as the man lay dying.
Um, that was irony.
Dogs reflect their masters. It’s a police problem not a dog problem.
FWIW, I once lived in a black ghetto (I"m white) and one of my neighbors was specifically training his Doberman to attack white people. Not that this is equivalent, just shows that dogs are malleable.
I once fostered a dog that was super shy and would hide from everyone. Unless you happened to be black. Then she was your new best friend.
I always wondered what her back story was.