NY Post:
A Minneapolis homeowner demanded to know why a cop responding to a burglary call shot her two dogs at point-blank range — after one approached wagging his tail.
Surveillance video shows the unidentified officer with the Minneapolis Police Department walking backwards in a back yard with his gun drawn when a Staffordshire terrier — named Ciroc — walks toward him wagging his tail Saturday night. The cop suddenly fires his pistol, hitting the dog in the jaw before the animal runs off.
“He was wagging his tail,” the dogs’ owner, Jennifer LeMay, told the Minneapolis Star Tribune. “My dog wasn’t even moving, lunging toward him or anything.”
Just as Ciroc is shot, a second Staffordshire terrier named Rocko darts into the frame, prompting the cop to fire again, striking the dog in the side, face and shoulder before the officer calmly hops a 7-foot wooden fence out of the yard.
The dogs survived, but LeMay says the family is suddenly overwhelmed by the vet bills after the shooting. Ciroc is back home after a $900 vet bill, but still needs up to $7,000 in surgeries at the University of Minnesota. Rocko, meanwhile, returned home late Sunday. Both dogs are emotional support animals prescribed by a doctor for LeMay’s sons, who have severe anxiety, she said.
“My dogs were doing their job on my property,” she told the Star Tribune. “We have a right to be safe in our yard.”
I’ve watched the video. I’ll embed it below (sometimes that slows page loading).
I know dogs. This dog was only moderately interested in the goings-on, and was absolutely no danger to anyone. The cop should be arrested and charged with cruelty to animals and spend time in prison. I feel compelled to repeat the counsel I’ve given before concerning LEOs and dogs. First, as to general rules.
Turning now to the dog, there is no moral or legal requirement for expecting me to own beasts that roll over and play dead when a cop comes around. That isn’t what good dogs do. People have dogs in part for self defense. I strongly suspect that the dog wasn’t a danger to the neighbors, and like most dogs, they know the neighbors and are gentle with them, or at least not a mortal danger.
My own 90 pound Doberman can jump a six foot fence, and when threatened (I’ve witnessed it before), she never backs down, but goes after the threat, trips the threat from behind with her gigantic paws, gets underneath the threat, and bites for the neck / thoracic region to choke air. Fortunately when it has been other animals uncommon to the area I stop her since she obey my voice commands immediately.
She is also such a “lovey” dog she wants to climb up in the lap of any neighbor who comes by. Cops are not neighbors. Cops are foreign to the area. Dogs interpret cops as a threat, and sometimes they are right. There is no way to distinguish between cops and anyone else. Dogs don’t do calculus.
Turning now to the cops, they had no intrinsic right to be on another man’s property. Judges may say so, or state regulation may say so, but it just isn’t justifiable morally. No one was being killed or kidnapped. This was a call for loud music.
I have had two exchanges with cops over the last decade that I can recall. Once they wanted to enter my home (not for me, but to discuss someone else), and I mentioned that they were welcome but I should restrain my dog. They said, “great idea – we’ve had some instances of bad interactions and the chief wants us to retreat and let people restrain their dogs.” The second time, a cop wanted my help with someone and Heidi – my dog – happened to be loose and in the driveway. He approached on the road, but didn’t venture too far and stayed 20 or 30 yards away and called for me. I put Heidi up and obliged.
If I had to list a few pointers for cops the list would go something like this:
1. Do not approach another man’s property assuming you have a right to be there. Ask permission first. Get people to restrain their beasts.
2. Assume every man is armed.
3. Assume every home has a big dog.
4. Unholster your weapon only as a last resort.
5. Do not waste your time making stupid stops. Stopping someone for a broken running light is a stupid stop when you can be shutting down gang activity. There is another regulatory scheme to ensure that the broken running light gets fixed, i.e., car inspection. Be loath to interact with men when they are in a confined space such as a car or truck. You can’t tell what they are doing, and they can’t tell what you are doing. Unless you are an outstanding communicator, your commands are likely to be misunderstood or misinterpreted, or worse yet, incomplete and unclear or even contradictory like in the case of Castile (show me your ID but don’t move).
6. Most dogs are not “pure bred killers.” Most dogs take on the personality of their owner and only want to protect their owner. Understand this. Work with it, not against it. Use it to your advantage. Learn to work with animals, farm animals included. Train animals if you need to in order to gain this experience.
Next, I’ll turn to animals themselves and what LEOs should know. I only have to do this because men won’t be men and train their sons to handle animals. Sadly, in the main this is missing from American culture today, and America treats animals more and more like Muslims treat animals. I consider Muslim treatment of dogs and other animals to be cowardly and immoral, backward and even barbaric.
I have fallen off, been thrown off, bitten, run over, kicked, and just about anything that can happen on or around a horse. I have ridden horses all day long, and I do mean all … day … long, and gotten on to do it again the next day. And the next day. And the next day. I have fed them, herded them, doctored them, and assisted them to mate. If you’ve never witnessed horses mating first hand (and I’m not talking about watching the Discovery Channel), it can be a violent affair. I’ve ridden with saddles and then also (in my much younger years) bareback over mountain tops along narrow trails while running the herd). The hardest ride was bareback and (on a dare) without a bridle, only the halter.
From the age of fourteen and beyond into my early twenties, I worked weekends and summers at a Christian camp above Marietta, South Carolina named Awanita Valley (and Awanita Ranch in Traveler’s Rest). We trained and trail rode horses, fed them and cared for them, hiked the trails and cleared them of snakes and yellow jacket nests (have you ever been on a horse when it came up on a yellow jacket nest?).
When we weren’t doing that, we were cutting wood, hauling supplies, digging ditches, and baling hay. My boys did the same thing, and Daniel later (before the Marine Corps) worked for Joey Macrae in Anderson, South Carolina, an extraordinary professional horseman, breaking and training horses. I have ridden in the rain, blazing sun, and snow. I have seen my son Joshua and his horse buried up to his thighs in snow, and watched him ride the horse up from sinking in the drift and stay on him while keeping the horse and him safe.
Why is all (or any) of this important? Because as I tried to convey in my earlier post, it is critical to have an understanding and mastery over animals, especially if what we think will happen in America really happens. And Mountain Guerrilla is right about logistics too. But I’m not so sure that the Army was the first to field this idea. See my article on Marines and Mules. The Small Wars Journal had discussion on the importance of animals to logistics long ago.
The problem is that the Marine Corps has forgotten the lessons, and I’m afraid that the Army will never really take them to heart. The modern U.S. military is techno-weighted down, with gadgetry, doohickeys, and reliance on constant logistics. The so-called big dog is a symptom of this sickness, as is the huge budget for DARPA every year. Truthfully, I think this is all related to the effete pressure for gender neutrality in the military.
But don’t you forget these lessons. Plan ahead. Learn how to make fire, how to purify water, how to fight, how to make your way around terrain, and how to navigate with maps and a compass (rather than using GPS like the liar Marine Corps officer candidates who were found out during officer’s school).
And learn animals. Your life will be better for it. This goes for cops too.
For LEOs (and all other men), learn to doctor animals. Learn their anatomy. Learn the necessity of voice inflection and timbre. Learn voice commands. Learn how the movement of a shoulder one way or the other can communicate things to animals. Learn what to do with your eyes.
If you are a LEO and your father was a putz and didn’t teach you any of these things, then go to a farm and volunteer your time in order to learn animals. They are much more predictable than men and sometimes much better company. Your life will be enriched for it.
Not that any LEOs will take this to heart. Then again, from the cowardly pussies like you witnessed in the video above, we can move to the criminally pathological like we have seen in Buffalo and now in Detroit.
Two Detroit residents filed a civil rights lawsuit against the Detroit Police Department Wednesday, alleging that several police officers needlessly and maliciously shot their three dogs during a marijuana raid.
Kenneth Savage and Ashley Franklin say that on July 22, 2016, Detroit police raided their house and found the dogs in a back yard bounded by an eight-foot-tall fence. The officers refused to let Savage and Franklin retrieve the dogs and, instead, shot them.
The reason? Officers found several potted marijuana plants in the backyard Savage and Franklin contend were there legally.
The suit is now the third active civil rights action against the Detroit Police Department for killing dogs during marijuana raids. A Reason investigation last year found that the Detroit Police Department’s Major Violators Unit, which conducts hundreds of drug raids a year in the city, had a nasty habit of leaving dead dogs in its wake. One officer had killed 69 dogs over the course of his career, public records obtained by Reason showed.
According to a search warrant affidavit, a Detroit police officer, while investigating an unrelated matter, observed several marijuana plants outdoors at the home of Savage, Franklin, and their son.
Two days later, eight Detroit police officers arrived at the house. Police were aware Savage and Franklin had a permit to grow medical marijuana, but the plants were in violation because they were visible outside, the search warrant affidavit said.
When Franklin showed police her marijuana paperwork and demanded to see a search warrant, an officer responded, “If you keep asking for a warrant, we are gonna kill those dogs and call child protective services to pick up your kid,” the lawsuit says.
Officers detained Franklin and searched the house, but could not get to the marijuana plants because of the dogs. They initially called animal control but decided to destroy the animals, the lawsuit says. Officers shot and killed one dog through the fence, broke into the backyard enclosure, and fatally shot the other two. Animal control arrived ten minutes later.
There is only one solution to the criminally pathological like this, and retraining isn’t it.
