Despite the stakes, most police departments do not require animal-encounter training. Only California, Colorado, Illinois, Tennessee and Texas have state laws mandating dog-encounter training for law enforcement.
Crosby’s training courses — like other types of law-enforcement drills — focus on putting officers in realistic scenarios where they have to quickly evaluate situations and make decisions. Those skills can also pertain to human encounters, reducing the risk of fatal shootings in general.
The trainings focus not only on dog behavior but on deescalation tools. Pepper spray, he noted, is nearly 100% effective at deterring dogs. The goal, Crosby says, is to remind officers that “these tools are effective” and that “no, you don’t have to shoot Fluffy.”
In May, police in Sturgeon, Missouri shot and killed Teddy, a 13-pound deaf and blind Shih Tzu mix that had stumbled into a stranger’s yard. The city justified the officer’s lethal actions, claiming he saw Teddy “behaving strangely and displaying signs of possible injuries” that was “perceived to be rabid behavior.”
In August, police in Davenport, Iowa shot and killed Myst, a black Labrador, in front of her family. Her owner, Don Hesseltine, said the officer left the scene immediately after the shooting, which was later deemed lawful.
Video footage of the incident shows Myst running alongside the family children when a police cruiser approaches. The officer instructs the children to put Myst inside the house. As they attempt to comply, the officer exits his vehicle and walks toward the property.
Myst approaches the officer and barks. The officer fires two shots. The dog retreats in pain, collapses and dies as her family screams.
“She was just trying to say hi,” one of the children can be heard saying in the video.
A 2020 study found that officers shot more dogs in nonwhite majority census tracts compared to white ones.
Police-on-dog violence, in other words, maps closely to police-on-human violence. Since more than one-third of American households have a dog, officers are likely to encounter one when they approach or enter a residence.
There is little to no data on how often police officers are actually injured by someone’s pet dog. But police dogs bite thousands of citizens every year, according to research from The Marshall Project, a nonprofit newsroom focused on criminal justice.
To Crosby, the situation points to deeper problems with American policing. “We’ve got issues within the police community, where certain responses have become programmed that are maybe a bit more over the top than the way I was taught.”
Claudine Wilkins, an animal law expert, attorney and former prosecutor in Georgia, helps represent those affected by pet shootings in court. She actively works with Crosby to spread awareness about the need for better police training. But while dog-encounter training is available to police departments for free, most simply don’t use it, Wilkins said — leading them to face legal costs and bad publicity when tragedy happens.
Police do sometimes encounter truly dangerous dogs. Often, though, the dogs they kill are well-behaved family pets that only want to protect their homes and families from intruders.
Because officers are granted broad legal protections under threatening situations, and because dogs are legally considered property, many dog shootings do not lead to legal proceedings or disciplinary actions. But these incidents can sometimes lead to lawsuits, costing small police departments millions.
With or without lawsuits, these dog shootings leave families like the Carrs traumatized. “I wish officers knew that dogs as a whole are not a threat to them,” Tessa Carr said. “Dogs are not criminals and should not be treated as such.”
“Zeta was family,” Carr said. Weeks later, the family still can’t bring themselves to fold up or throw away her crate. “These tragedies are preventable, and I hope that Zeta’s story can bring awareness to these injustices,” she added. “More than anything, I don’t want another family to have to go through this unnecessary pain.”
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