From Reason.
Police entered a back yard in Mobile, Alabama, encountered a dog, and shot it. A Tehachapi, California, officer saw a dog run toward him while he was performing routine code enforcement checks. “He just pulled out his gun and boom, boom, boom,” reported a witness. An officer responding to a complaint about a moving van in the street in Columbus, Ohio, shot a dog nine times after it growled at him. And in Filer, Idaho, an officer shot a dog whose owner was throwing his 9-year-old son a birthday party. You can watch the dash-cam video (warning: strong content and language) by Googling “officer shoots dog at boy’s birthday party.”
What is interesting to be is that you never hear about police shooting cats.
Comments
8 responses to “They Shoot Dogs – Don’t They”
It’s amazing to me that no dead dog owners have shot cops yet.
Do kittens count?
TV shows and movies have depicted the rights that safeguard the public as impediments to bringing the guilty to justice. Real life imitates art in this case and now large numbers of cops don’t give a tinker’s damn about the rights of citizens and their property. Too many cops crave action and barking dogs allows them to scratch that violent itch many of them have. And the WOD has played a major role in cultivating an “us vs. them” mentality that has led to more aggressive LEO’s.
Randy,
Alcohol prohibition had similar results. Police were held in low regard well into the 50s. Bribery being the most commonly imputed offense. Cops were always good for a laugh on TV.
And just as police were getting their reps back the WOD ramps up. Which was good for their reps at first and now has turned into a debacle.
This officer is typical of what we see today:
http://reason.com/archives/2014/05/21/another-day-another-cop-shoots-a-dog#comment_4526461
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Or this:
At one place where I used to work as a cook, the local cops would sometimes take over the bar. It was pretty crappy when they did, because they were very loud and disruptive and drove off all the other customers, but it’s not like anyone could kick them out.
Anyway, I got to overhear them talk shop. Apparently one of the best parts of the job is choking people. They all loved to do that.
One night a particularly drunk cop was complaining that he’d never had the opportunity to kill anyone. His buddies consoled him, since they too took the job in hopes of killing someone.
That’s why people become cops. To choke and kill people.
http://reason.com/archives/2014/05/21/another-day-another-cop-shoots-a-dog#comment_4525939
I can’t tell if these cops are just itching to shoot something or whether they’re so unaware of dog behavior (and dogs are really, really common the last time I looked) that they can’t distinguish between genuinely aggressive behavior and simple self-defense or play behavior.
After the recent heroic rescue by Tara the cat, the police just might start shooting cats as well.
How do postal workers make their deliveries day-in day-out without wholesale doggie slaughter?
Simon,
I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a time before the 1950’s when Americans thought highly of the police, at least big-city police. A common perception of the beat cop was as the corrupt official who would victimize shop-owners by nonchalantly stealing apples (among other things). That’s why there were so many Irish cops–it was a way to leverage voting power and patronage to make money. Prohibition didn’t corrupt the police, they were already horribly corrupt. It just increased the magnitude of the payoff.
I suspect the reaction to that corruption is the reason for the professionalized forces and the increased esteem for the police starting in the 1950’s.
I’m not sure about the situation out West–though I suspect that the white-hat status of local law enforcement on the frontier is partly retrospective in nature. The range wars involved a lot of bought-and-paid-for “peace officers”…