The moment a government agent chooses to violate someone’s rights, they should be assumed to have resigned their position effective instantaneously.
Their actions from that point on are those of a private individual. Their previous status as a servant of the public is no matter; they abandoned that status the moment they forswore their oath of office.
A private individual commanded a dog to attack a harmless member of the public; and the dog obeyed that command and attacked that person.
The private individual is to be charged with a felony, and the dog is to be put down as a danger to humankind.
You had me right up until putting the dog down. I get what you’re going for, but the dog was doing exactly what it was trained to do. That in of itself may be a problem, but putting the dog down only serves to add a level of moral and emotional ambiguity in most people’s minds. In reality 100% of the blame, culpability, and punishment should land squarely on the officer.
You’re right.
To the point the person you’re responding to is trying to get at though – the whole idea of a “police dog” is fucking insane in the first place.
The things police dogs are used for are things police shouldn’t be doing, or are complete bullshit. “drug sniffing” is nonsense. Chasing down and attacking people is cruel on any level, either to the person being attacked, or it’s cruelty in sending a dog to attack someone armed with various weapons. Either way, the dog shouldn’t be part of the situation in the first place.
I’m not sure I completely agree that dogs have no place in law enforcement. I can give a few examples:
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Cadaver dogs and tracking hounds are an important part of criminal investigations at times.
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Bomb sniffing dogs are definitely an important line of defense.
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I think there is also an argument to be made that dogs are extremely useful in specific kinds of tactical situations which I would agree should be restricted to highly specialized and well trained police units.
Where we agree is that the prevelance of K9 units that are used to give false positives that lead to drug arrests, or the gratuitous use of K9 units in normal arrests is not acceptable or warranted. It is also shown to be abused time and time again. But again, I think there is more nuance to the issue which is difficult to account for during the justifiably negative emotional response people are having to this case, and the discussion needs to be had.
In general, an animal with a record of mutilating innocent people mustn’t be kept in civilization. Something has to be done with the dog. Send it to a nice farm upstate?
There are all kinds of people with various dog training/skills in this world who take in dogs with problems from not being safe around small animals, or other dogs, or kids, or men, or women, etc.
I’m sure it wouldn’t be too hard to find people qualified and willing to take on this kind of dog “problem” (the dog did what it was trained to do, I’m not sure why that would be a problem necessarily. If it attacks someone outside of it’s training then I’d be with you).
Hell throw in special training and some kind of state/local tax break for anyone willing and able to sign up for retired police dog owning.
Yes, the person should be charged with a crime for what he did, but the dog was just following its training as a police dog. They’re supposed to do what the handler tells them to do. It’s not the dogs fault; it did exactly what it was supposed to do had the situation called for the dog to attack.
Then I suppose the trainer is an accomplice in the crime.
What would you do with the dog then? Send it to a farm? It’s trained to attack humans. We don’t let a dog like that live in the city.
The dog is not a danger to anyone unless the attack command is given. That’s the whole point of training them.
Yes, and would only do so if the attack command is given. That’s the point. They don’t train police dogs to just attack whenever they feel like it.
