Dog Killer Police

Starting about two summers ago, I had a job at a law firm where my main responsibility was digitally archiving closed cases. Several of the cases involved police brutality. After reading several gruesome scenarios in which people had been beaten and beaten to death by police, I asked my boss more questions about the cases. He often noted that those were the hardest cases to win.

Incidents such as the Rodney King beating, the murder of Amadou Diallo, and several senselessly violent SWAT raids have brought the issue of police brutality to the table of discussion. While cases of police beating people absolutely still occur, police departments try to maintain good reputations by learning from the lessons because of well publicized mishaps. Citizen watchdog group Cop Watch serves as a way to report police misconduct. But one issue remains unchanged and largely unspoken: that police are killing dogs.

I first began to realize this problem in the summer of 2008 when the mayor of my neighboring town, Berwyn Height, MD, had his dogs killed in a SWAT raid. A package of marijuana was shipped to his address, but it was supposed to be intercepted by a drug dealer long before it had arrived in Maryland. Prince George's County Sheriff Michael Jackson did a very poor investigation and ordered a no knock warrant for a raid of mayor Chavo's house. They did not realize that he was the mayor, they did not realize that his 80 year old mother was home, and they did not realize that the marijuana was not supposed to arrive at his house anyways. The first thing the officers did upon entering was gun down the mayors dog and throw his mother on the floor, in handcuffs.

Only a few short months ago, I read a story of a SWAT raid in Missouri that was all to similar. Police produced a search warrant for a man suspected of selling marijuana. They waited a week to carry out the operation and failed to do any further research before doing so. They busted in at night, when the mans 7 year old child was asleep in the house. They shot the family dog before searching the house, only to find "less than a gram" of marijuana.

And again, just last month a cop shot a woman's pitbull and threw it down a staircase because it had a minor altercation with another woman's dog. The department offered no apology. Why has our "tough-on-crime" trend in this country grown to the point that cops can bust into anyones house and kill their dogs? It is inhumane, it is unjust, and it happens more and more every year. Police departments and officers must be able to be held accountable for the murders they commit.