Are police K-9 units inherently a good idea?

[wuushew]

I was walking back to my office from my car and I passed three or four sheriff vehicles each with a German Sheppard in them. The all seemed a agitated and barked loudly at me as I passed

Does the good that police dogs bring outweigh their animal nature and tendency to maw or injure possibly Innocent people? Unlike a gun or tazer, a human nor human ethics can completely control animal instinct. Therefore why does law enforcement introduce uncontrollable elements into the mix?

Despite being man's best friend all dogs are domesticated carnivores.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

1. Absolutely.

They're trained to stop biting on command.

Sure, man's best friend is a domesticated carnivore.

But then again, man's just a domesticated chimp.

[rock]

3. "man's just a domesticated chimp"

Did you have someone specific in mind?

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

4. Actually, no.

I have a more favorably view of dogs than I do of humanity.

[wuushew]

10. the command to stop only works after the first bite is rendered

A human always has to chance to try verbal communication before resulting to physical violence.

How can a animal understand the nuances of law enforcement situations? It seems it is a chance society has decided to take based on the percentage of true bad apples in suspected/convicted criminals.

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

11. Uh huh.

And the first bite isn't rendered until the dog is commanded to attack.

"How can a animal understand the nuances of law enforcement situations?"

It doesn't have to, that's its handlers responsibility.

[pooja]

2. They are great in search and rescue... Dangerous as a hunter.

And they use huge german shephards mostly... These dogs can easily weigh 150 to 1801bs. Worried about a rotty, a german shephard can eat a child for lunch in one swallow.

[Fierce]

5. I think they're fine.

nt

[Debau2005]

6. I think they are a better

deterent then tazers. How do you know they weren't drug dogs or some other kind of sheriff dog? Not all law enforcement dogs are used to hunt people down. I bet when the sheriff is chasing a subject and he yells stop or I'll let my dog go he gets more people to stop then if he yells I have a tazer!

These dogs should have been trained to sit quietly until they are used, I would report the agitated barking to the sheriff's department. If you approached them, I understand their agitation, but if you were far enough away from the car they should have not uttered a sound. Someone may differ with my opinion, but I have a neighbor that is in the K-9 unit, his dog does not move without a signal from him.

[Nozebro]

7. It goes to the larger point about the need/desire to get more people

into the criminal justice system. There are many, many reasons for that desire/need, such as:

* Control of the masses

* $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$pecial interests (too many to list here)

* Need for cheap labor

[sweetheart]

8. Perhaps different dogs are in order

If the dog is for 'taking down perps' and stuff like that, then i can see a german shepard,
but if the dog is in the car most of the time, keeping the police officer alert, and working
as a goodwill officer with kids, a hunting terrier might be better. Its less threatening
and is just as good for sniffing things out and assisting an officer in duty line, if nothing
else, an extra pair of eyes and a warm heart to keep an officer feeling balanced in a world
of hate and cynicism.

[madmusic]

9. This is war.

The war on the drugs. The war on crime, and dogs play a valuable role, just as they did in http://www.vetmed.ucdavis.edu/CCAB/war.html">WW II.

[mongo]

NO!

Using drug sniffing dogs Should be a violation of the 4th amendment. The police can't use xray technology to look inside your house, why should they be able to use a dog to detect what is in locked areas of your car?

And using dogs against people is cruel and inhumain. And the police dog is given a status approaching that of a law enforcement officer. It is a felony to harm a police dog.

I just hope that I'm never bitten by one, because I will not be able to control my own instincts - which will result in one seriously maimed animal.

[soothsayer]

12. Who would watch COPS without the dog attacks?

[BrotherBuzz]

13. Did you read the caution sign on the vehicle?

Those dogs are well trained but you were invading turf they instinctly need to guard. Outside the backseat, and on the street, those dogs do exactly what they were trained to do and show no aggression without command, they are under total control of the handlers. You might be surprised, but those dogs go home with the handlers at night and play with kids on the living room floor.

[keepCAblue]

14. I don't think using dogs is a good idea, but for different reasons

There are so many dogs that are injured or killed in the line of duty. Humans have the capacity to choose whether to engage in a high risk career--if officers get killed in the line of duty, it's of their own choosing. Dogs cannot make that decision. Yet it is the most dangerous situations that police often expose their dogs to (send in a dog to apprehend or corner a dangerous felon, because the situation is otherwise too dangerous to place an officer in). The dogs engaging in felon apprehension are often shot, beaten, stabbed, kicked, slugged--you name it. And, to worsen the situation, the vast majority of police departments do not equip the dogs with safety vests--very few dogs are offered that extra bit of protection and it's often only because of vests that have been donated by local communtiy orgs or children who've raised the money to help protect the police dogs. Police departments argue against buying vests for their service K9s because, they maintain, the vests are too expensive. Yet their HUMAN officers are ALL given vests for protection.

Frankly, from an animal advocacy point of view, I'd like to see ALL dogs removed from dangerous police and military details, and if that's not going to happen, at least pass a law requiring that all police and military K9s be given protective vests while they're on duty.

To the poster who said that most police use German Shepherd Dogs (GSD)...these dogs are not typically GSDs, they're Belgian Malinois, one of the most common breeds used in police work.

[uppityperson]

15. Yes, well trained ones are an asset

most dogs don't have a tendency to maw or injure possible Innocent people. Most police dogs are highly trained and are an asset.

[Warren DeMontague]

16. That depends on whether the point is to piss away millions of tax dollars

on an animal whose primary intended law enforcement function is to find a doobie in some kid's duffel bag.

[Blue_In_AK]

17. We got burglarized a few years ago,

some young punk attempting to crawl through my teenaged daughter's bedroom window at 2:30 a.m. (she didn't know him). Had it not been for the K-9, he would have gotten away. Personally, it didn't really hurt my feelings too much that the perp had to appear at his arraignment in a wheelchair.

[wuushew]

19. So the crime of breaking and entering was rewarded with violence?

your making the assumption that such a breaking and entering would have resulted in physical harm to your daughter.

As a society do we have enough past evidence of criminal intent to reasonably assume that preemptive use of violence is warranted? If dogs and other methods are used pre-emptively before the onset of violence to an innocent how do we ever vindicate the appropriateness of these actions?

[uppityperson]

21. someone breaks into my child's room, gets hurt running away, ok

it is called a consequence.

"preemptive use of violence"? Sounds like this person was injured running away.

[Blue_In_AK]

25. Exactly...

The cops yelled and yelled at him to stop, surrender, get on the ground, etc. etc. etc., and he kept running. He ran into the neighbor's yard and hid himself up under the wheelwell of a big pickup truck they had, wrapping himself around the top of the wheel. The cops still were yelling at him to surrender himself and he refused. They let the dog go, and he bit the kid in the leg, at which time he came out.

I'm not a violent person, and I don't condone preemptive violence of any sort, but this kid was given every opportunity to give himself up and he refused. I consider that we were very lucky that our neighbor on the other side was out on her porch smoking a late-night cigarette, saw the guy cutting the screen and opening the window, and called the cops immediately. They were here within a couple of minutes (substation near our house), and stopped what could have been a very bad situation. We had no man in the house at the time, and I don't own a weapon, so we would have been on our own, me and my two daughters, if he had made his way in.

I'm not going to assume that the perp had rape on his mind, but it was certainly a possibility under the circumstances. A little known fact (which I know because I worked in corrections for a time) is that many "stranger" rapists start out as burglars ... rape is a crime of opportunity in those cases.

I'm sorry the kid got hurt, but he was given every opportunity to give himself up, and he refused. I feel better knowing that he was caught and had to pay a price for his actions.

[Nye Bevan]

23. Excellent

I hope the dog ate his testicles.

[ProfessorGAC]

18. No

I loathe the concept, with the minor exception of using dogs to hunt for potentially hurt of dead victims of crime or abduction.
The Professor

[Phx_Dem]

20. NO

[TahitiNut]

22. I'm for an 'all-volunteer' K-9 force! Abolish the K-9 draft!

:evilgrin:

[High Plains]

24. I'm with Mongo. Fuck those drug dogs...

and the cops who use them, and the Supreme Court that ruled that having a dog sniff your home or vehicle is not a search.

Hmmm, pepper spray in the wheel wells? Ultra-sonic whistles?

Search and rescue dogs--no problem.

[Blue_In_AK]

26. For what it's worth, given my response up thread...

I don't care for drug dogs either. I think dogs should only be used in situations where a crime-with-a-victim is being or has been committed, and the perp refuses to surrender otherwise.

[immoderate]

27. Drug dogs are a menace.

According to an article I saw on Sixty Minutes, the dogs are only right 30% of the time when signaling the presence of drugs. This is considered "probable cause." Sounds like the opposite to me.

Trained animals like this are very sensitive to subliminal cues of their handlers. drug dogs are very unreliable, except under test conditions. I suggest that anybody nailed by a drug dog get the dog's record on discovery, and have the evidence excluded.

--IMM

[ileus]

29. I've never heard of a K-9

I've never heard of a K-9 unit here attacking anyone that they weren't "set on'' to attack. Their human partner has them under wraps until they are let go. From what I understand the training is ungodly intense and more dogs "wash out" than make it.

[immoderate]

30. Did you read what I wrote?

I didn't say anything about attacks. Nothing at all.

--IMM

[benEzra]

28. Depends greatly on how they are used...

I agree 100% that taking an alert by a dog as "probable cause" to conduct a search of your car is a misuse of the animals. Personally, I think that under most circumstances, a dog search should be viewed the same as any other search under the 4th Amendment, and require probable cause to conduct a sniff search. But that's just me.

[politicat]

31. I consider the sniffers unreliable.

Because they don't get nuance.

We had a housefire back in December, and the cause was just random -- I'd been cleaning out the cabinets, put a bunch of old kitchen chemicals in a bag to go away, and then (I think) thoughtlessly set the bag on top of a box of trash. Turns out that there was a leaky bottle of lye and a leaky bottle of vinegar in the chemical bag, and the heat there was enough to light the trash, which ended up gutting the kitchen.

The sniffer they brought in decided it was arson -- because of course, there were chemicals in the mix. (The heat of the fire was enough to melt a bottle that held some oily cleaning substance, so there were petroleum residues in the trash, too.) I was lucky - thoughtlessness is not a crime, and no charges were filed, but it was a very delicate time for me. Really fortunately, the insurance company agreed that accidents happen and paid off.

The dog knows nothing about cleaning house. The dog knows nothing about trash. All the dog knows is what she smells, and she smelled petroleum. Even I know enough from reading mob novels that the best way to deliberately set a fire is with a cigarette butt; had I been planning on an arson (and believe me, it was much more difficult to lose our stuff, deal with cops, attorneys, insurance investigators, fire fighters and other people I had no interest in dealing with than moving, cleaning, refurbing, and selling a house is) a chemical fire was not on my agenda for that day.

Drug dogs get false positives as well; a local group proved that drug dogs can't tell the difference between an energy bar containing hemp seeds or new hemp fabric and marijuana. So I don't trust them. Besides, dogs like pleasing their people, and dogs don't understand the difference between making their person happy and getting a treat and doing the job right and getting a treat.

And there's always the infamous milkbones in the luggage coming through customs story....