Ohio police officer who released police dog onto Black man with hands raised is fired
Circleville Police Officer Ryan Speakman "did not meet the standards and expectations we hold for our police officers," the police department said.
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The moment a government agent chooses to violate someone's rights, they should be assumed to have resigned their position effective instantaneously.
Their actions from that point on are those of a private individual. Their previous status as a servant of the public is no matter; they abandoned that status the moment they forswore their oath of office.
A private individual commanded a dog to attack a harmless member of the public; and the dog obeyed that command and attacked that person.
The private individual is to be charged with a felony, and the dog is to be put down as a danger to humankind.
You had me right up until putting the dog down. I get what you're going for, but the dog was doing exactly what it was trained to do. That in of itself may be a problem, but putting the dog down only serves to add a level of moral and emotional ambiguity in most people's minds. In reality 100% of the blame, culpability, and punishment should land squarely on the officer.
You're right.
To the point the person you're responding to is trying to get at though -- the whole idea of a "police dog" is fucking insane in the first place.
The things police dogs are used for are things police shouldn't be doing, or are complete bullshit. "drug sniffing" is nonsense. Chasing down and attacking people is cruel on any level, either to the person being attacked, or it's cruelty in sending a dog to attack someone armed with various weapons. Either way, the dog shouldn't be part of the situation in the first place.
I'm not sure I completely agree that dogs have no place in law enforcement. I can give a few examples:
Where we agree is that the prevelance of K9 units that are used to give false positives that lead to drug arrests, or the gratuitous use of K9 units in normal arrests is not acceptable or warranted. It is also shown to be abused time and time again. But again, I think there is more nuance to the issue which is difficult to account for during the justifiably negative emotional response people are having to this case, and the discussion needs to be had.
In general, an animal with a record of mutilating innocent people mustn't be kept in civilization. Something has to be done with the dog. Send it to a nice farm upstate?
There are all kinds of people with various dog training/skills in this world who take in dogs with problems from not being safe around small animals, or other dogs, or kids, or men, or women, etc.
I'm sure it wouldn't be too hard to find people qualified and willing to take on this kind of dog "problem" (the dog did what it was trained to do, I'm not sure why that would be a problem necessarily. If it attacks someone outside of it's training then I'd be with you).
Hell throw in special training and some kind of state/local tax break for anyone willing and able to sign up for retired police dog owning.
Great. Dog lives.
The original trainer loses their job, though, because we don't need dogs trained to mutilate people.
Yes, the person should be charged with a crime for what he did, but the dog was just following its training as a police dog. They're supposed to do what the handler tells them to do. It's not the dogs fault; it did exactly what it was supposed to do had the situation called for the dog to attack.
Then I suppose the trainer is an accomplice in the crime.
What would you do with the dog then? Send it to a farm? It's trained to attack humans. We don't let a dog like that live in the city.
Police dogs retire all the time. Assuming this highly trained animal goes to a cartaker who doesn't know or issue the commands, that dog is harmless as any other, arguably more so
It sounds like you just have a problem with concept of police dogs in general. That's fine, but it's a separate discussion.
It's trained to attack on command. Remove the person giving commands and the dog no longer attacks.
The dog is not inherently dangerous because it was trained to attack.
The fuck? I was good with everything until the end.