12-27-2016, 12:23 PM
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Court rules police can shoot a dog if it moves, barks when officers enter a home
Quote:
A federal court ruled that police can shoot a dog if it moves or barks when an officer enters a home.
The decision stems from an incident in Battle Creek, Michigan where, according to court documents, police shot and killed a dog while executing a search warrant on a home looking for drugs.
Mark and Cheryl Brown filed a petition with the court to hold the officers and the city responsible for the deaths of their dogs in 2013.
They said that the officers “unlawfully seized their property in violation of the Fourth Amendment when officers shot and killed two dogs while executing a search warrant.”
One of the officers testified that he shot the first pit bull after it appeared to move “a few inches” and lunged at him. According to court documents, the dog then retreated to the basement, where the officer shot and killed it.
Court documents say the officer shot the second dog after it went to the basement, turned sideways and barked at the officers.
Another officer then shot and killed the dog after it ran into the back corner.
The officer saw “there was blood coming out of numerous holes in the dog and…did not want to see it suffer so he put her out of her misery and fired the last shot.”
In the decision, the court said Mark and Cheryl Brown failed to provide evidence that the first dog did not lunge at police and that the second dog did not bark.
“Given the totality of the circumstances and viewed from the perspective of an objectively reasonable officer, the dog poses an imminent threat to the officer’s safety,” Judge Eric Clay wrote in the decision. “The standard we set out today is that a police officer’s use of deadly force against a dog while executing a search warrant to search a home for illegal drug activity is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment when…the dog poses an imminent threat to the officer’s safety.”
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Court rules police can shoot a dog if it moves, barks when officers enter a home | Firstcoastnews.com
The focus of attention should be on the second dog. Quite frankly, this is akin (by analogy) to the police shooting one man and then the man's friend complains and tries to avoid police so he gets shot too...
The officer's description of the situation (IMO) fails to show why the second dog should have been shot.
Klein said the first dog continued barking aggressively and “lunged” at him when he went inside, although he specified the “lunge” only involved the dog moving “a few inches.” At that point, he shot and wounded the dog. Both dogs then retreated into the basement. The officers then entered the basement in order to “sweep” the place for drugs and possible other suspects. When the wounded dog at the bottom of the stairs began barking again, Klein shot and killed her.
At this point, the second dog was standing in the middle of the basement. Klein testified that she started barking while standing still and facing away from the officers. He fired two shots at her, and she ran to the basement’s back corner. Officer Damon Young said he shot the dog when she started “moving” away from the corner and toward him. The dog ran behind a furnace, at which point Officer Jeffrey Case fatally shot her. He said didn’t want to see her continue to suffer and that there was “blood coming out of numerous holes” in her body. And I think this sums it up... Dog trainer Brian Kilcommons, who has collaborated with the Department of Justice on improving police encounters with dogs, disagrees. He called the ruling “beyond the scope of sanity.”
Law enforcement officials frequently mistake signs of fear for aggression, Kilcommons said. The fact that the dogs ran away from the officers and into the basement was much more “telling” than any barking, he said, no matter how aggressive it may have sounded.
“In such a high-tension situation, expecting a dog not to bark is just plain stupid,” he told The Huffington Post. “The worst thing according to this precedent is that every dog barks when a stranger shows up.”
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