In a Police State Where They Kill a Lot of Dogs

Last year, American police killed more unarmed American citizens than Isis and Al Qaeda combined.

What's going on?

The problem is simple: We have recruited from the bottom half of the high school class, militarized them, wrapped them in a cocoon of impunity, and then incentivized them to escalate everything towards court or jail, which makes for big overtime pay for cops, as well as jobs for police, bailiffs, defense lawyers, judges, magistrates, prosecutors, court reporters, and prison guards.

Consider  the graph below and the seven-fold increase in incarceration we  have seen since 1970.

Part of the rapid rise of the police state we see in the U.S. today can be seen in the routine and almost casual shooting of family pets.

Police either do not know how to deal with dogs, due to incredibly poor training, or else they shoot dogs simply to terrorize citizens and demonstrate their police powers.

On Oct. 20, 2015, a Florida City police officer came to this home to let them know their car door was open. The family's 2-year-old dog, Dutchess, ran out the front door, and the officer immediatly shot and killed the dog.

As The Washington Post noted in a recent article, it's not like the police have a rational excuse for the shootings, and it's not like there are clear steps that cannot be taken to reduce the mayhem.

[J]ust like police officers, postal workers regularly encounter both vicious and gregarious dogs on their daily rounds. But letter carriers don’t kill dogs, even though they are bitten by the thousands every year. Instead, the Postal Service offers its employees training on how to avoid bites. (In addition, the agency keeps a centralized database of dog bites, a marked contrast to the lack of data on police killings.) At the sessions, handlers put postal workers through sample scenarios using live dogs, teaching them how to calm a dog, distract a dog and even fend one off if necessary. Similar training for meter readers has massively reduced instances of bites.

Trainers say that in many cases, officers simply have no idea how to read a dog’s body language. Dog behavior counselor Brian Kilcommons, who helped produce the Justice Department’s training videos on police encounters with dogs, says officers’ inclination to “take command and take control” can cause them to antagonize dogs unnecessarily. “What they term as aggression is usually fear,” Kilcommons says. Officers “need to realize they’re there to neutralize, not control.”

He adds: “If they have enough money to militarize the police with Humvees, they have enough money to train them not to kill family members. And pets are considered family.”

Even when they occur, dog bites are rarely a serious enough threat for lethal force to be a sensible response. According to the Officer Down Memorial Page, a national database of law enforcement officers who lost their lives in the line of duty, 15 deaths in the past 70 years have been animal-related, but none of them involved a dog attack. (Almost all involved horses or insect stings.) One would expect, then, that there would be very little need to use a firearm.

Yet it happens all the time...

Yes it does. And the police continue to do it with complete impunity, same as they do locking up 2 million more Americans a year than they did in 1970.

It's time to defund the police. It's time to end the runaway abuse of power, and to fence up against the rise of the American police state. There is something terribly wrong with the criminal justice system when we have twice as many people, per capita, locked up in the U.S. than the Soviet Union or South Africa did during their most brutal civil rights-destroyong periods.