Let's talk about banning police dogs

In My Humble Opinion
21

It is terrible to use a dog in such a manner. You basically have to brainwash the dog into treating strangers as enemies. Police dogs can’t be easily retired from their jobs, if policemen they’ve worked with don’t bring them home and assume the responsibility of a dog whose socialization with all other living things had been destroyed then they will likely spend the rest of their life miserably in a cage. One time dropping my dog off at the daycare/groomers/trainers a policeman brought out his K9 partner. This dog clearly wanted contact with every person and dog he saw but his partner had to drag him outside and into a car. Coming back in to pay the bill he explained how the dog was not allowed contact outside the K9 program save for the officer’s own family. He was being trained to consider all other as a threat, only reserving himself while under officer control. These are probably good dogs, almost all are, so I’m sure he obeyed his partner and was not a random threat to society, but there’s no accounting for all circumstances and this dog will never get to run free in a dog park with other dogs or ever be off leash around other people.

Don’t know why they’re considering a ban, but those are reasons enough for me. I wouldn’t treat a human that way so I’m certainly not going to treat a superior species in that manner.

22

What did that dog ever do to deserve being killed?

What the police do is transfer the risk of their excessively violent practices to others. In this case, their dog, in other cases, the person they’re arresting.

23

I wonder how it correlates to the percentage of Black and Latino people having the job as target when training the dogs to attack.

24

I haven’t seen any evidence of police training dogs to attack racial minorities since Bull Connor was a pup.

Banning this particular tool apart from the named exceptions could readily backfire.

When a suspect is corraled and is about to be cuffed/detained, police dogs sometimes are standing by (and barking) under the control of their handler, as an added incentive for the suspect to give in quietly. Without the dog threat, there’d be more instances of violent resisting arrest, leading cops to use excessive force/Tasing and resulting in more injury to suspects and officers.

Police dogs are also sent into hazardous situations, like when a suspect is thought to be holed up in a house or a business that he’s burglarizing. Here’s an example. It’s sad when a police K-9 is injured or killed in such a situation, but loss of human life is arguably worse.

25

This doesn’t jibe with the police dogs I have interacted with. All of whom have been friendly, well-socialized, and completely sane. For example the PD demo at the county fair, where a heavily padded ‘bad guy’ ran away when the handler told him to stop, struck at the dog, or struck at the handler, the dog attacked – on command only. Then he was recalled, and ran back wagging his tail, and afterward was happily petted by all the children watching the demo. I have also watched protection-dog training. Hostile dogs flunk out. Selection is for bold, mentally stable dogs with high prey drive and the capacity for obedience under high arousal conditions. The dogs are happy when they work (indeed they live for it), and not aggressive when they aren’t asked to be. They are bred and trained to be able to discern the difference between being on the job and off.

They are typically retired to their handler or to another service officer but some go out to the general public – although as with any high-powered guardian breed the adopters need to know more than the typical dog owner.

26

Dogs aren’t entirely dumb either; they can do things like put together that their family/handlers looks and smell a certain way, and so do the other people that they interact with regularly.

Then when someone else comes along who looks and smells different than their “normal people”, they’re going to be wary, if not aggressively defensive.

In a law enforcement situation, that strikes me as a training failure of omission; there’s got to be explicit attention paid so that the dog doesn’t get the idea that “race X = cops = good”, and “everyone else <> cops = bad” just through observation.

27

Let’s be 100% clear about this scenario. A person suspected of stealing some shit from a railroad car was surrounded by police and hiding in a rail car. In response to this person forcing the police to WAIT (i.e. he didn’t come out when told to) they sent in a police dog to attack.

When the suspect successfully defended himself from this dog attack, the police subdued him with a taser.

The sheriff then has the gall to suggest that the dog died saving lives from a dangerous criminal. The dog died because the police were impatient, because they are trained to demand obedience from “civilians” and can’t bear the idea that some perp didn’t immediately do as he was told. It falls right into the police pattern of increasing the level of conflict until the perp gives up or “forces” the police to violently subdue them.

28

So the solution in such cases is for police to wait indefinitely and hope there are no emergencies cropping up elsewhere?

Or would you have been OK with the suspect “successfully defending himself” from police by stabbing them instead of the dog?

29

Agree.

Using a police dog to “sniff” for drugs around a car is a convenient way to bypass the driver’s 4th Amendment rights. More often than not, the handler will claim the dog makes a hit, when it did not. (Or the handler will wipe some drug residue on the underside of the trunk lid.)

30

My sister had a rescue dog that was racist. She was afraid of black people, and hostile towards them. It was very embarrassing for my sister when walking the dog.

31

The solution is for the police to be trained to negotiate, and not just to overpower civilians.

32

It would be good if the police valued the lives of the people they are supposed to be serving and protecting more than their donut time, sure.

How many cops did they really need there? If there was some sort of emergency, I’m sure that 90% of them could have left to deal with it and left plenty behind to negotiate with this person who was terrified of the armed men screaming at him.

It probably would have actually deescalated the situation in fact, and make it more likely that the suspect comes out peacefully on their own.

Ah, so the police dog’s death prevented a cop from being stabbed? How’s that work out, exactly?

33

Yes.

Yes. At least the human being who is deciding to launch an attack is the one at risk of being stabbed, instead of the dog who is looking forward to getting a good boy treat.

Police in this country need to embrace the concept of de-escalation. If that means wait, you wait. If that means don’t launch at attack on a guy who is hiding in a box, then don’t launch an attack.

Your example of a person being surrounded by cops AND a snarling dog barely held back by his handler is exactly what’s wrong with policing. It is a panic inducing choice by the police, and it is their choice to do it.

34

Police dogs are essentially terror weapons, especially when used for crowd control. I’m not a fan of policing through intimidation. It’s the police saying “defy us and we will set loose this unpredictable animal who may do anything ranging from barking at you to eating you alive.”

35

Yes, that seems like the obviously better solution. If the police force can’t deal with more than one crime at a time, that sounds like the police force has a severe competence problem.

36

I mean, I like dogs. Many days, probably better than their human companions.

But a dog comes rushing at me, snarling and biting, I’m gonna subdue it, probably by killing it. I like my own life more than I like dogs.

I’m not going to kill a cop who comes at me, as in theory they should have more self control than an animal, and in theory shouldn’t cause me injury in taking me into custody.

They sent this dog in, trying to use it to torture someone, and instead, they sent it to its death. Its actions in this story did not contribute to anyone’s safety.

And for what? A misdemeanor theft charge.

37

The dogs are likely to pick up on cues from their handlers, even if the handlers aren’t aware of giving those cues. Dogs are really good at that.

I agree that it’s important to be able to continue to use dogs in situations in which biting people isn’t at issue; especially for search and rescue.

It’s far easier to tell the percentage of people who are accused of, or who are convicted of, crimes than to tell the percentage who actually commit them.

You can’t accurately conclude the third figure from either or both of the first two, unless there’s no bias involved. So you certainly can’t assume the third from the first to in order to try to conclude that there’s no bias involved.

Around here they hold formal retirement ceremonies for K-9 officers, identified as officers; and the newspaper stories always say that their handler will be keeping the dog as a household member for the rest of the dog’s life. I don’t think their socialization with everyone else has been destroyed, any more than it has been with any other working dog who’s expected to behave differently when on duty than when off – the dogs are often taken into classrooms and expected to be friendly with the children, and the human partners often have more than one dog, and/or other animals, at home.

Some places may well be handling the training and/or retirement differently, and much worse; that I don’t know. But it doesn’t have to be handled so that it damages the dog.

Yeah; it does seem to me that if consent was refused, then consent was refused. Having the search effectively done by a dog seems to me to violate the sense of the reasons why it’s legal to refuse consent.

My parents did too. They adopted a dog, and then found out that they needed to shut her up in a bedroom or her yard whenever anybody Black came to the house. They were also embarrassed; but at least walking the dog wasn’t a problem, as they had a sizeable fenced back yard and she was let out there instead of having to be walked out in public.

They thought it was possible she’d been abused by somebody who was Black, and had leapt to incorrect generalizations. I don’t remember whether it occured to us at the time that she might have been previously owned by racists; but that’s certainly another possibility.

38

My sister’s dog had been left on a chain all day, where teenagers threw rocks at her. My sister speculated that some or all of those teens may have been Black. But we never knew for sure. For the record, my sister has owned many dogs, (she tends to adopt elderly rescues) and none of the others were racist, there’s no question the dog came to her that way.

39

Where I am, the police dogs are trained to continue to attack until the suspect stops fighting back. But it’s virtually impossible to remain motionless while a police dog is biting you. There are numerous lawsuits from people permanently maimed from police dogs.

I was going to link one, but there are so many online that I couldn’t even pick one.

40

There’s a few in the controversial encounter’s thread.

The one that is most memorable in my mind was that a person was wanted on a warrant, they knew the police were on their way, so they were sitting on the curb with their hands on their head.

And the cop sicked his K9 on him. Just for funsies.