I don’t agree that shooting animals is rare. Maybe because of the type of area. I worked in a very suburban area surrounded by urban areas. The deer have no natural predators except cars. There is no place to hunt around here. The deer population is huge. Driving around at night you see herds of deer on people’s lawns. Putting down deer hit by cars is relatively frequent. I’ve had to do it several times during my career. As a supervisor I kept a box of ammo just to give bullets to my guys when they put down a deer. It certainly isn’t treated like an on duty shooting. A quick notation in the CAD is all that’s needed.
I agree with you about the survey. Very flawed. In the history of my department there were 2 on duty shootings, one long before I was hired and one during my career. That’s pretty typical. It’s rare but it may seem more often because each time it happens it’s big news, at least locally.
I don’t know what those flaps on the holster would be for other than looks. Police holsters generally are double or triple retention which means it takes two or three separate actions to remove the gun from the holster. They are harder to get the gun out than having a flap and a lot harder for someone to remove it from you.
How much paperwork is needed for drawing your gun is up to each state. Pointing your gun at someone in my state requires a use of force report. It didn’t always.
I live in a rural area and this shows up on the daily police dispatch reports quite often. Reading the 911 dispatch reports is a morning hobby of mine. Plenty of deer and elk here.
“Vehicle vs. deer, Deer dispatched, county road dept advised.” DIspatched means BLAM, shot by officer.
We now have a road kill law that allows people to salvage the animal if they want to. They have to go on-line to fill out a form i think.
Back in the late 90s (so things may have been different) my friend was driving through rural Indiana. He hit a deer with his car and killed it. He called police to come out and make a report for insurance purposes (his car had been damaged).
He told me that, while he waited for police to show, three people pulled over asking for the carcass. He told them they were welcome to it but only after he got his police report done (no one waited for that).
I have no idea what the laws were regarding that back then (if any).
There’s a bit in the Canadian news today about an officer dispatching a badly injured deer with an axe. The optics are not good, but I assume it was because Canadian police cannot simply shoot injured wildlife. Still, putting one out of it’s misery is probably the best action.
I agree killing a badly injured animal is a mercy but is an axe really the best choice if you have a pistol on your hip? I’m curious why they cannot just shoot them? Same result, a bit less gruesome (and probably better for the animal).
I would be upset shooting an injured animal as a mercy killing but I’d do it. I seriously doubt I could do the same with an axe though. That’s just me.
Isn’t there an on-call mobile vet for precisely this reason? While a police officer may or may not have basic first-aid training, are they trained to assess and deal with injured wild animals or in the American Veterinary Medical Association guidelines for the euthanasia of animals should that indeed be called for (gunshots are covered in the guidelines, subject to experience and skill of the shooter, muzzle energy requirements, bullet selection and firearm safety)?
Seriously? Where do you live? I live in a county of 30,000 sq. miles, with about an equal number of people. At any one time there are 2 to 4 State Police officers trying to cover mainly the highways. There is no mobile veteranary service, two vet clinics in town for cats and dogs, if you can get in.
A mobile vet would spend all of their time, and more, just driving around euthanizing road struck animals, who would be waiting in agony for hours, maybe days, they would just die on their own if the police did not intervene.
AFAIK all Canadian police carry pistols. I think it’s only the UK where the police are typically unarmed. I did a quick Google image search for gendarmerie and for Dutch, German, and Italian police and all seem to have pistols on their belt. I remember on my first visit to Rome, walking by a bank and being surprised by the guard (or police) outside holding a machine gun or assault rifle with a big magazine in 2001. I don’t think I’d actually seen a policeman carrying a long gun In North Amerca up until then. Also we were in Paris 1999 and due to bomb threats, the Metro was being patrolled by police accompanied by squads of soldiers with machine guns (assault rifles?).
A city with millions of people. I won’t vouch for any municipal services, but I did once see the mobile vet around midnight, so it was not just convenient business hours. There are 4 vet clinics within 5 minutes’ walk from my building and at least one 24-hour one within 15 minutes. I will be honest with you, though, deer need (I assume) to go to the wildlife place which is not downtown— I have no idea how smooth it would be to get an injured animal there, and hope never to personally find out. I’d like to imagine they could organize something better than sending a random cop to blow it away.
More anecdotal evidence - the county I live and worked in has roughly 800 municipal officers serving a resident population of about 250,000.That does not include state police or feds. The population number does not include visitors. Atlantic City, alone, reports 27 million visitors per year. Police shootings do happen but they are rare. Just a guess but I’d say far less than one police shooting per year in Atlantic City. The rest of the county combined is probably about the same or less. The NJ AGs use of force stats show 8 incidents of police discharging a firearm at a person for the period from October 1, 2020 through July 31, 2023. The were 7 instances of animals being fired at. (None of these took place in my county.) There are approximately 31,000 police officers in NJ.
So, you tell me. How likely is it that any given officer will discharge his weapon in the line of duty in a given year? Extrapolate that out over 30 years. The bottom line is that is very rare for an officer to ever discharge his weapon during his/her entire career.
Nobody is taking an injured deer to a vet. There is an overpopulation problem as it is. No one is paying a vet to be on call 24 hours to treat what are basically vermin at this point. We have so many here my dog doesn’t even react when they walk 20 feet from her.
No. In the UK, most cops dont carry guns. French, German (including some HK full auto weapons), Spanish, Canadian, pretty much most of the world. Police firearm use by country - Wikipedia(except%20for
In some Canadian forces, the amount of paperwork involved might have convinced the cop that an axe was better. Local canadian police often have rigorous rules on firearm use.
They can take hours to get there, even if they have such a thing.
In Pennsylvania, the deer are the property of the Commonwealth and are managed by the State Game Commission. An injured deer wouldn’t be allowed to be treated as it would no longer be fit for consumption.
If that so called research PEW did is including shooting animals (not a routine thing where I am but it does happen) in the numbers that’s just more evidence that the entire thing is ridiculous. It skews the results and is very misleading. By not having a separate index for that it makes it appear that police officers are shooting at humans far more than they are. I’m thinking that might have been their intent!
I don’t even count discharging a weapon at an animal. I’ve used my baton for different things other than striking people. I wouldn’t answer a survey saying I’ve used my baton hundreds times unless there was a section for non-defense use of it.
I maintain that cite is poorly done and overall misleading.
What the hell do they do with them?
While it’s rare here that doesn’t mean it never happens. An injured, suffering, thrashing deer in the middle of the freeway needs to be taken care of ASAP. Waiting who knows how long for a game warden is cruel to the animal and dangerous for motorists.