First came the defund the police movement, with entirely predictable disastrous results. But that wasn’t enough for some California Democrats. If a new bill currently being considered in the state legislature is passed, they will be defunding police dogs next. Or perhaps defunding is the wrong word. They’re looking to simply ban police dogs in most circumstances. And why would these heroic and noble animals need to be banned? Because using police dogs is racist, of course. And one of the bill’s leading sponsors even invoked the era of slavery in his explanation. Clearly, California is dealing with an onslaught of white supremacist dogs and something needs to be done. (ABC News)
A new effort is underway to ban police from using police dogs to arrest or apprehend suspects. If passed, it would also ban police from using them for crowd control.
The lawmaker behind the bill, newly-elected Assemblymember Corey Jackson, said that the use of police canines, or K9s, has been the backbone of this country’s history of racial bias and violence against Black Americans.
Jackson said police canines were first used by slave catchers and are a violent carryover from America’s dark past.
“That is a vicious and unforgiving part of our history that has created nightmares that has institutionalized and created generational trauma in the Black community for centuries,” said Jackson.
As I said, they’re not talking about a complete ban on police dogs. (Because that would be crazy, right?) Under this bill, the police would still be able to use dogs to sniff out narcotics, explosives, or dead bodies. But the dogs could never be used to take down a suspect because they might bite someone.
Assemblyman Corey Jackson described the use of police dogs as “a gross misuse of force” that disproportionately impacts Black and Hispanic communities because apparently everything does. He went on to claim that dog bites can produce “lifelong injuries – before you’re proven guilty.”
Republican Assemblymember Tom Lackey, who previously worked as a Highway Patrol Officer pointed out the obvious. Police dogs offer a non-lethal option when arresting resistive or combatant suspects. Removing the police dog from the equation leaves the officer with one less option before resorting to lethal force. Wasn’t that suppose to be one of the key goals of “police reform” efforts?
The ACLU is supporting the bill because of course they are. But the police unions are opposing it as another tool to make police officers less safe and make their jobs more difficult.
None of the Democrats supporting this bill seem to want to come out and say what this is really about. They don’t want the police arresting people, particularly people of color. Guilt or innocence apparently doesn’t factor into the equation. It’s also worth noting that there have reportedly only been two deaths caused by police dogs in modern history. One was a man found breaking into a car dealership in Alabama in 1984 and the other was a woman in Florida in 1990. The bill’s supporters were not able to point to anyone in California having been killed by a police dog.
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