{"id":22810,"date":"2013-11-04T10:33:04","date_gmt":"2013-11-04T15:33:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=22810"},"modified":"2013-11-04T10:33:04","modified_gmt":"2013-11-04T15:33:04","slug":"almost-half-of-all-firearms-discharges-by-police-officers-involve-the-shooting-of-a-dog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/11\/04\/almost-half-of-all-firearms-discharges-by-police-officers-involve-the-shooting-of-a-dog\/","title":{"rendered":"“…almost half of all firearms discharges by police officers involve the shooting of a dog”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Even if you’re not a dog lover, this story from Charles C.W. Cooke<\/a> should get you upset:<\/p>\n

A Google search for \u201cdog shot by police officer\u201d returns countless stories from across the United States. YouTube, too, is full of harrowing videos. There is even a website, the bluntly titled \u201cDogs That Cops Killed\u201d blog, which seeks to \u201ccollect a few of the innumerable instances of police officers killing dogs\u201d and to push back against the \u201cwars on drugs, peace, and liberty.\u201d<\/p>\n

This unlovely trend has claimed the attention of Patrick Reasonover, a libertarian filmmaker in California who is currently raising money for a proposed documentary, Puppycide<\/em>, through the crowdsourcing service Kickstarter<\/a>. \u201cWe\u2019re excited by this one,\u201d Reasonover tells me, \u201cbecause on so many issues \u2014 the War on Drugs, for example \u2014 it\u2019s impossible to move the ball. You can feature the problems with the drug war, but there are so many embedded interests that one documentary isn\u2019t really going to solve the problem. With this issue, however? We feel that it could.\u201d<\/p>\n

Around eight months ago, Reasonover began to notice the proliferation of online videos of police officers shooting dogs. \u201cPeople were going nuts about it,\u201d he recalls. \u201cThere were tons of views on these things. We had dogs and we were disturbed, so we thought we\u2019d reach out and start contacting some of the victims.\u201d In doing so, he quickly learned that the news reports and the published footage were only the beginning of the story. Because police departments don\u2019t keep easily accessible records of dog shootings, it is hard to gauge the scale. A recent review of public records by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals concluded that almost half of all firearms discharges by police officers involve the shooting of a dog. But nobody really knows.<\/p>\n

Indeed, even animal-rights activists aren\u2019t fully aware of the numbers in their communities. \u201cThey would tell us that there were, say, five news stories on these dogs that got shot,\u201d Reasonover says. \u201cBut through my digging and persistence I found out that actually, you know, 22<\/em> were shot and no one ever knew.\u201d One thing led to another, and he discovered that \u201cthere is a set of people who are working across the nation, through lawsuits or legislation or appealing to the Justice Department.\u201d As part of his project, Reasonover is hoping to file Freedom of Information Act requests in all major cities and jurisdictions in the U.S. and to get hold of all firearm-discharge records. From that, he hopes to assemble a better list.<\/p>\n

It may make brutal reading. A recent lawsuit in Milwaukee filed by a woman whose dog was killed forced that city to compile its records. \u201cThey found that a dog was shot every seven days,\u201d Reasonover says. \u201cJust in Milwaukee<\/em>.\u201d And, unless something changes, the number will only continue to rise. \u201cOver the course of the past forty or fifty years, dogs have moved from the barnyard to the back yard to the bedroom,\u201d Ledy Vankavage, the senior legislative attorney at Best Friends Animal Society, has observed. In the meantime, the drug war has been ratcheted up, terrorism has become a pressing concern, and, as Radley Balko has so distressingly chronicled, the police have become increasingly militarized. \u201cYou have this recipe for these police entering our lives more and more and more,\u201d Reasonover explains. \u201cThe dogs are there, and so they are killed.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Even if you’re not a dog lover, this story from Charles C.W. Cooke should get you upset: A Google search for \u201cdog shot by police officer\u201d returns countless stories from across the United States. YouTube, too, is full of harrowing videos. There is even a website, the bluntly titled \u201cDogs That Cops Killed\u201d blog, which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,13],"tags":[119,49,72,98],"class_list":["post-22810","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-law","category-usa","tag-drugs","tag-guns","tag-pets","tag-police"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-5VU","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22810","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22810"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22810\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22811,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22810\/revisions\/22811"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22810"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22810"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22810"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}