I picked out all the quotes I found most salient:
-
“Based on the behavior exhibited by the dog, believing the dog to be severely injured or infected with rabies, and as the officer feared being bitten and being infected with rabies, the SPD officer felt that his only option was to put the animal down,” a post on the City’s Facebook read.
-
“UNACCEPTABLE!!! Sturgeon Police force is seriously a joke,” one user wrote.
-
“This is a disgrace. The officer involved needs to be immediately removed from duty and charged with felony animal abuse."
-
“I pray the owner sues the city, the mayor, the officer and the department. I will be filing a complaint with the State Attorney General’s Office. The entire city council should resign after hiring this man.”
-
“What a disgusting and disappointing response to abuse of power and neglect of an animal,” wrote one person.
-
“If it’s ‘within his authority’ to shoot a dog who is not a clear threat to anyone then no person or animal is safe in our town. I am so beyond disappointed in this city,” said another.
-
“That dog was injured and confused, not rabid. He wasn’t even barking or being aggressive. He didn’t even yelp when the catch pole was put on him. I am just in shock over this.”
-
“If your officers are that afraid of a little dog wandering around… maybe, just maybe, they shouldn’t be police officers.”
-
“The officer was going strictly based off the fact that the dog walks with his head sideways due to him being deaf and blind,” he said.
Officials, after just four days, determined the officer was not wrong in his actions.
As if the act of murdering someone’s dog wasn’t infuriating enough the city has to go and say the officer did nothing wrong when they very clearly and objectively did. I can’t imagine the rage the owners must be feeling right now.
One of the most popular recent movie franchises is literally about a guy who goes on a murder rampage because someone killed his dog
Why the fuck did they think this would go over well.
John Wick did a bunch of justifiable homicide.
One of the most popular recent movie franchises is literally about a guy who goes on a murder rampage because someone killed his dog
Should have left Frodo’s labradoodle alone!
“If your officers are that afraid of a little dog wandering around… maybe, just maybe, they shouldn’t be police officers.”
THIS. Dogs are a fact of life in a community. If you can’t handle being around them without losing your shit and thinking your life is in danger, you shouldn’t be a cop. Doesn’t matter if you’re great at all the other cop stuff, you don’t have what it takes to safely enter other people’s property.
If you get bitten by an animal you think has rabies (or an unknown mammal) go to a hospital lol. Police probably get treated for free.
Free at point of care but taxpayers pay for it
All these quotes and not one single person will actually do anything about it because it doesn’t actually affect their lives in any way
Or, you know, the implied threat of use of lethal force against them, or lifetime harassment to their entire family. As it is known to happen to anyone who acts or speaks against cops.
But if everyone stood up and said “This isn’t right, this needs to change”, it would.
But the people won’t
Because they only think about themselves
None of these things happen in modern countries
If anyone was going to do anything about it, posting that online would be incriminating.
15 down votes for this true statement. Incredible community.
-
Unrelated to the incident, but I’m getting really fucking tired of articles using some unknown set of people posting online as justification for the conclusions of their articles. I don’t give half a shit what someone posted on the departments facebook page. I give a shit about the incident at hand. Don’t tell me how other people reacted online and expect me to do the same. Tell me what happened and let me come to my own conclusion.
Garbage article and garbage cop.
“The news used to tell me what happened, and I decided how that made me feel. Now the news tells me how to feel, and I have to decide if I believe what happened.” -Someone in a meme
I’m not sure how to feel about this one…
You should be nodding in silent accord.
Amen to that. It’s the same as articles saying there is widespread outrage about something, but its actually just a few angry tweets that they could scrape together.
It’s because journalistic integrity is dead. Whoever wrote this had a word quota, and just started reporting on Facebook comments until they reached it.
Love when half an article is “Comments on Reddit such as…” Do your fucking job journalists.
Penny pinching news media.
Fuck yes. I mean, obviously we all agree the most egregious thing is the pissant fuckin pig shooting a goddamn dog after only attempting to catch it for three fuckin minutes.
But Huffington Post, this terrible outlet the independent, they’re not real journalistic outlets. They’re literally made by and for social media. Their only real value is in sharing outlandish headlines. That’s the entire model they were built around. And when those of us that actually read the articles do so, we realize there’s almost nothing of value to be found in the body. But these places survive and even thrive by sites like this one, with large segments of the user BASE jumping right in to comment without reading it anyway. It’s clickbait with the facade of an article.
This police department really gave a gun and a badge to someone who fears for his life encountering a 13-pound shih tsu.
If the people that become US cops aren’t already like that they break them to become like that during “training”. I highly recommend looking up the shit they say and show during police training in the US, it’s absolutely bonkers. They make them so scared of everything and fuck them up so badly that stuff like this is fully expected. So fucked up.
police training
That’s what, 8 weeks?
Varies by department. I think 3-6 months is pretty common. Obviously insufficient but slightly better than two months.
Pretty nice. We have the police trained 36 months (Bachelor’s degree, here’s more about it).
Some could say there’s a difference.
Is it even that long?
Training for call centers is longer than that.
Moved to the police force sometime after an excessive force lawsuit when he was a correctional officer.
I’m not surprised. There’s all kinds of fucked up backstories like this once you start digging. There are very unhinged people out there who get warnings, get put on admin leave, maybe transferred. Very difficult to fire if local govt and unions are involved. And you bet your ass they protect each other because that means selfishly protecting themselves and the entire department.
In the US a dog that works with the police has many protections legally.
In the US any other dog is merely property and the police kill them with impunity.
In the US when a police dog is euthanized there are lines of officers and police workers and first responders to show respect.
In the US any other dog is just leverage for the police to threaten.
They don’t even treat their own police dogs with respect. There’s videos of cops yanking and choking them, body slamming them, etc. that that other stuff is just for show.
ACAB
There is no situation where calling the cops can’t make it worse.
It’s a fucking shihtzu, which are tiny. And this ones blind and deaf. Holy shit do we need drastic and violent police reform. Like fire 90% and completely retrain from the ground up. Not gonna happen though obviously.
The Department of Justice estimates that American police officers shoot 10,000 pet dogs in the line of duty each year. It is impossible to ascertain a reliable number, however, because most law enforcement agencies do not maintain accurate records of animal killings. The tally may be substantially higher, and some suggest it could reach six figures.
Cops are all cowards
Also ACAB
WTF???
I just watched the video. It’s about 5:30 into the video. Everything leading up to him shooting the dog is not justified at all.
Holy shit that just went from him being bad with the catch pole to shooting the dog with no provocation. He was following the dog around for a while being a little dog who didn’t want to be caught. No growling, barking, or charging. Pretty sure that’s completely incompatible with how rabid animals work. It was a silly dog just wandering around a field and wriggling out of a badly applied restraint. Then just switch over to blast the motherfucker.
Unreal that we succeeded at getting these maniacs to wear and use bodycams, the city watched the video, and they decided it was a good shoot. The was NOTHING to justify it, not even in a “people make bad decisions under stress” way.
You can see his shadow with the catch pole a few times. He’s not even using two hands on it, which I believe means there was no way it could work. Hence why he couldn’t restrain the dog despite being able to easily loop it over his head multiple times due to it being BLIND.
I said “awwwww!” a split second before the shots were fired. The little guy could have easily been caught with the pole or picked up with bite gloves.
Plus, you can get a rabies shot immediately if it bites you.
This guy took five minutes before he decided the dog was simply wasting his time.
This was disturbing. If you’re reading this and care enough remotely about animal life, don’t watch this. Even though it’s not the most graphic video I’ve ever seen, it was still disturbing to see how cold-blooded these people who are supposed to be our public servants are.
If you or I did what this officer did, we’d be facing charges.
I can’t watch it.
We’ve previously adopted a senior dog. He was basically deaf when we got him and had 50% vision in one eye. He was able to go out in our small fenced yard and find his way back but occasionally got confused. Occasionally our neighbor’s kids would leave the shared gate open and he would end up in their yard.
If this happened to him I would lose it.
I just happen to have a blind and mostly deaf shih-tzu, so I don’t dare watch it either
Something that sticks out to me as someone who works in 911 dispatch (rest assured, I think my cops are bastards) is that I didn’t even hear him key up to give his dispatcher a heads-up first (I don’t want to give him the benefit of the doubt but it’s possible he did and I missed it, I had my volume on pretty low)
Luckily we haven’t had any cop shooting dog incidents in my county while I was working, and the small handful I’ve heard of that happened on other shifts have been justified cases where a dog actually attacked someone, but what we do get is a whole lot of injured deer or other critters that have been hit by a car and need to be put down, and our cops always key up beforehand to let us know before they do it, if only so we’re prepared if 30 seconds later we get a call about shots fired in the area. Ignoring how inappropriate his actions were in shooting the dog, this was definitely a situation where there was no immediate danger and he could have taken an extra minute to radio his dispatcher to give them a heads-up and let them send a message to the calltakers “in case of shots fired calls in the area, officer dickbag is putting down a potentially rabid dog.”
Of course this douchenozzle has no respect for life, he doesn’t even have basic courtesy towards the people he works with or the people in the neighborhood who might be startled by hearing gunshots. People are understandably very relieved when they call in terrified that they just heard gunshots and we can confidently tell them “an officer just had to put down an injured deer a couple blocks away, so that’s probably what you heard” and it saves us from having to enter a call for it that they then have to acknowledge.
Side-note, it’s mind-blowing to me how many people just ignore what they think are gunshots. I work in a pretty diverse county that has a little bit of everything, but for the most part it’s just various flavors of suburbia, not exactly the hood where shootings are an everyday thing or the sticks where every other neighbor is hunting or target shooting in their back yard, gunshots should trigger some alarm bells for most people. It’s wild how many people will mention off-handedly that they thought they heard gunshots but didn’t call for some reason, or they wait until way after the fact to call about it. Now I’m also pretty sure 90% of them are probably misidentifying what they heard (we get so many people calling in shots fired for fireworks, cars backfiring, doors slamming, etc. sometimes I can hear the fireworks in the background whistling, sizzling, and crackling in very un-gunshot ways while my caller swears up and down that they “know what gunshots sound like,”) but even still, that’s one of those cases where you should probably err on the side of caution. I’m personally very willing to ignore a lot of things, but if I think I hear gunshots somewhere I shouldn’t be hearing them, I’m calling 911 immediately.
Regarding the side note, people will stop calling in when they are asked “are you sure it wasn’t fireworks” nearly everytime. It is discouraging. From personal experience.
I generally avoid asking that except in 3 kinds cases
-
We already have multiple calls around the area for fireworks, and then one person calls in saying they think it’s gunshots.
-
Cases like I mentioned where there’s very obvious fireworks going on in the background that I can hear on the phone.
-
It’s on or very near a holiday that you’d expect there to be fireworks, 4th of July, New Years, Diwali, etc.
Even in those cases, if you insist it’s gunshots, I’m entering it as gunshots. Not my place to make that call and I don’t want that liability on me if I make the wrong one. If our cops want to ignore it that can be on them. Some agencies are better about this than others, but my training was very clear that I should enter the call for whatever the caller is telling me is going on, not what I think is going on, they’re there seeing or hearing it, I’m not.
-
I live in semi-rural suburbia, but honestly, there are so many different types of banging noises around here from people doing construction or repair work to cars running over temporary metal plates in the road that I wouldn’t be able to tell you if one was someone target shooting in their back yard (or worse).
I’d be calling in almost every day for things that sounds like gunshots. Because too many assholes around me have modified their cars to intentionally sound like that. Hard to tell in the distance but very easy to identify when they are going by my house.
I’m personally very willing to ignore a lot of things, but if I think I hear gunshots somewhere I shouldn’t be hearing them, I’m calling 911 immediately
Nah, if I’m wrong I’ll have to talk to a cop for no reason. If one of my neighbors turns up shot or missing the next day I’ll mention it sure but if nothing comes of it no way. I don’t want to be on their radar at all if possible. If someone was shot the damage is done me calling won’t help them.
If someone was shot the damage is done me calling won’t help them.
We had an incident one morning where a passerby called in someone laying on the sidewalk, appeared to be unconscious. Cops and EMS got out there, and it was a shooting victim, obviously deceased, had been there for hours.
Turns out that multiple people in the area had heard shots overnight but decided not to call.
I dont know the details about exactly what kind of injuries the victim sustained, they could have died instantly, or they might not have and if someone had called in the gunshots they might have been found and taken to a hospital and possibly could still be alive today.
I’ll have to talk to a cop for no reason
Department policies and how individual officers use their discretion will of course vary, but in general unless they get out there and find actual evidence that something happened, most of the time they aren’t going to give a shit about talking to you. They go out, drive around the area, maybe park and walk around a bit on foot, if anyone happens to be outside they’ll ask if they heard anything, and unless you indicated that you want to speak with the cops, they’ll be on their way.
Also, if you call from a cell phone, we usually don’t automatically get your name or address (there’s some exceptions with some types of WiFi calling, femtocells, and how much emergency info you’ve filled out on your phone, or if you’ve previously called and gave your info we can look that up,) just a location based on cell tower triangulation that isn’t always super accurate. Yes, we can probably get the info from your phone company if needed, but unless they actually find an issue and need to follow up with you, no one involved on our end wants to go through that process.
Just give your nearest intersection, say what you heard, say you want to remain anonymous, and decline to provide your address. If you’re really paranoid about it, if your phone has a physical sim card take it out, or call from an old phone without active service and we won’t even get your phone number to look up. Just please for my sake don’t be a dick about it, so many of my anonymous callers get really argumentative “well why do you need my name? Nah, I’m not giving that to you, you see this is why people don’t call 911, why are you asking all these questions what if I was dying I could be dead” my dude, I get it, let me just move on to the next thing already so I can hang up and answer my next call (or you can just hang up at any time, that’s also an option)
Why was a cop even involved here? Doesn’t animal control exist for situations like this? Yknow, like someone actually trained to handle animals instead of someone trained to behave like an animal?
I live in a decent size county, and our three animal control agents only works four hours a day six days a week and all calls go through 911. So if animal control aren’t available, I could see 911 sending a cop…although he had an animal lasso, so maybe they do both jobs in that city.
I used to work 9-1-1 in a pretty small town and our policy was to send a cop for every call. We once had someone call because an opossum was outside the door to a shop and it was scaring people. Cop went and shooed it away.
So it could also be that.
Police are like a box of chocolates.
(dark punchline)
They’ll kill your dog.
When I first read this, I thought it said “police called to help shoot him dead” and I was like yeah, that’s why you would call the police, but why would you want him shot dead?
“Hello, police? Yes, this is Kristi Noem. Yes, I have a dog that got lost, so could you find it and shoot it for me? Normally, I’d just shoot it myself before it got lost, but I was running late this morning. Thanks.”
“I just didn’t have time to go to the gravel pit today”.
People who call the police think the police are there to help. They don’t expect the police will kill dogs or keep parents away from school shooters.
Based on how often it happens, and how the cops are never punished for it, I just assume that part of the job description for cops is to shoot people’s dogs.
Genuinely why are headlines the least comprehendable English these days?
Because all the people who write headlines grew up learning how to read and write on the internet and social media. And the bosses they present their work to for scrutiny? Also learned to read and write while arguing with other middle schoolers online or role-playing terrible fan-fic erotica.
I shudder at the thought of some erotica authors and their content being the example a person might aspire to write like, or worse, to learn from. Even as a very, very horny pre-teen I had to put down some stories because the grammar and spelling was so atrocious I could tell.
Or it was written by AI
I read: “Biden and deaf dog Teddy got lost in a neighbor’s yard.” I was disappointed, but willing to believe it
“I thought it might have rabies” is a sentiment born out of fear and ignorance. Just like “the man was displaying unusual behavior” or “appeared to be on drugs”
Well you don’t become a cop by exhibiting a never-ending wealth of knowledge.
Instead of hiring brave and smart people to be the police, it seems people who are not brave, and dumb, are hired so they have access to guns to protect themselves again whatever scares them, including innocent humans. Sad.
