Government Goons Murder Puppies!The drug war goes to the dogs.

Reason ^ | April 2006 | Radley Balko

[JTN]

In the course of researching paramilitary drug raids, I’ve found some pretty disturbing stuff. There was a case where a SWAT officer stepped on a baby’s head while looking for drugs in a drop ceiling. There was one where an 11-year-old boy was shot at point-blank range. Police have broken down doors, screamed obscenities, and held innocent people at gunpoint only to discover that what they thought were marijuana plants were really sunflowers, hibiscus, ragweed, tomatoes, or elderberry bushes. (It’s happened with all five.)

Yet among hundreds of botched raids, the ones that get me most worked up are the ones where the SWAT officers shoot and kill the family dog.

I have two dogs, which may have something to do with it. But I’m not alone. A colleague tells me that when he and other libertarian commentators speak about the 1993 raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco many people tend to doubt the idea that the government was out of line when it invaded, demolished, and set fire to a home of peaceful and mostly innocent people. But when the speaker mentions that the government also slaughtered two dogs during the siege, eyes light up, the indifferent get angry, and skeptics come around. Puppycide, apparently, goes too far.

One of the most appalling cases occurred in Maricopa County, Arizona, the home of Joe Arpaio, self-proclaimed “toughest sheriff in America.” In 2004 one of Arpaio’s SWAT teams conducted a bumbling raid in a Phoenix suburb. Among other weapons, it used tear gas and an armored personnel carrier that later rolled down the street and smashed into a car. The operation ended with the targeted home in flames and exactly one suspect in custody—for outstanding traffic violations.

But for all that, the image that sticks in your head, as described by John Dougherty in the alternative weekly Phoenix New Times, is that of a puppy trying to escape the fire and a SWAT officer chasing him back into the burning building with puffs from a fire extinguisher. The dog burned to death.

In a massive 1998 raid at a San Francisco housing co-op, cops shot a family dog in front of its family, then dragged it outside and shot it again.

When police in Fremont, California, raided the home of medical marijuana patient Robert Filgo, they shot his pet Akita nine times. Filgo himself was never charged.

Last October police in Alabama raided a home on suspicion of marijuana possession, shot and killed both family dogs, then joked about the kill in front of the family. They seized eight grams of marijuana, equal in weight to a ketchup packet.

In January a cop en route to a drug raid in Tampa, Florida, took a short cut across a neighboring lawn and shot the neighbor’s two pooches on his way. And last May, an officer in Syracuse, New York, squeezed off several shots at a family dog during a drug raid, one of which ricocheted and struck a 13-year-old boy in the leg. The boy was handcuffed at gunpoint at the time.

There was a dog in the ragweed bust I mentioned, too. He got lucky: He was only kicked across the room.

I guess the P.R. lesson here for drug war opponents and civil libertarians is to emphasize the plight of the pooch. America’s law-and-order populace may not be ready to condemn the practice of busting up recreational pot smokers with ostentatiously armed paramilitary police squads, even when the SWAT team periodically breaks into the wrong house or accidentally shoots a kid. I mean, somebody was probably breaking the law, right?

But the dog? That loyal, slobbery, lovable, wide-eyed, fur-lined bag of unconditional love?

Dammit, he deserves better.

Radley Balko is a policy analyst with the Cato Institute.

[Mojave]

Ask yourself how many of the other "poochie" stories referenced by this pro-drug, self-professed Libertarian writing in a Libertarian rag (Reason) are just as misleading?

Even the magazine name is misleading.

[Freedom_no_exceptions]

As would legalizing murder, rape, smuggling, extortion, money laundering, etc. Catch my point.

So what part of "cops would still have to enter people's homes in response to domestic violence, child porn, fugitives, etc." in my last post didn't you get??? Are you seriously comparing murder and rape to drug use? With a straight face??

[middie]

Comparing the conditions in the Maracopa County jail to the conditions under which troops in the field exist is totally non sequitur. Why not draw a comparison to the fate of earthquake or tusuami victims, or political prisoners under a Bosnian tyrant? Those make just a much sense. The convicted guys arestupid minor criminals having done those idiotic things that get one a 60 day sentence; not a felony where such deprivations and humiliations are closer to permissible. There is no justification for the jail's conduct, they violate every published jail standard from every agency.

The judicial system sentences a misdemeanant to a number of days incarceration, not starvation, not deprivation of basic human needs such as sleep, a dry place to be and not sujected to broiling heat and dangerous cold.

Any rationalization reeks of a generalized emotional reaction to the broader issue of crime within society. Societal crime is a problem that will not be resolved by this evil moron of a sheriff and his barbaric tactics. He does, however, bask is the spotlight of radio and TV interviews that focus on what he likes to describe as creative punishment techniques. He disreagrds the history that his barbarisms are a long way from creative. Dictators, tyrants and criminals against humanity have used them for centuries.

[El Gato]

The convicted guys arestupid minor criminals having done those idiotic things that get one a 60 day sentence;

Too stupid to understand, "If you can't do the time, don't do the crime"?

The comparison to troops was to point out that if the troops are routinely exposed to those conditions, and maintain their morale, then it can hardly be called "cruel and unusal punishment". That's what's in the Constitutions of both the US and of Arizona, and those are my standard.

Prisoners of course do not need the amount of calories or of water that active troops do, but they need enough water to replace what they lose. If the porta potties (or whatever arrangement they have) aren't being used, then they aren't getting enough water.

[El Gato]

Gatta love 17 year old girls worried more about how they look than how they play. ROFL I just have 2 rules...no bleeding and no crying.

I know what you mean, neither of my girls was still an active athlete at that age, but my niece is. She's 16, almost 17, and plays soccer and volleyball . She definitely wants to look good while playing. But, if you think about it, looking good probably increases their confidence, and is no worse than some of the superstitious behavior of male athletes that I saw, and partook of myself as a student manager, way back when.

[winston2]

Thank you....

...for not calling me a raving paranoid nutbag...

...as has been done before when I've made that point.

Proud to be in the same bag with you two.

"Count me in", said Crockett to Travis (and elkfersupper to Sam and winston).

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I'd love to continue the sensible dialog that we touched on - but - I think this thread is not a good place to do so. I'm not at all impressed with the article. I disagree fundamentally with the idea that police (they're just a cross segment of the whole of humanity) are dangerous to dogs.

Please feel free to ping me in on any thread you wish plus I am on [JTN's ping list] which is usually taken care of by my good friend - freepatriot32. I hope to soon cross paths with both of you.

[swmobuffalo]

"In Columbine they cowered outside while innocent schoolkids were being shot."

Regardless of what I think about the tactics discussed here, your statement is totally untrue. I'm not sure if it is an outright lie or just your ignorance."

Right or wrong, they cowered outside long enough for a teacher to bleed to death in the arms of his students.

[dr_who_2]

That's unconstitutional. Unless you're one of a handful of supreme court justices, perhaps.

[Atlas Sneezed]

I have long maintained that the underlying motive for the WOD is the militarization of our local police forces.

---

And those local militarized forces are the standing army our founders feared.

[TKDietz]

This guy is getting a following though. Our new sheriff now feeds everyone in the jail one bologna sandwich and a few boiled carrots three times a day now. No pink underwear yet, but then again our prisoners go without underwear if they don't bring them themselves. And yes, a lot of them have not been convicted, but most actually have and are anxiously awaiting prison beds. They'd rather be in the pen than in our jail. Our prisons are as overcrowded as our jails. Hardly anyone in the jail is actually serving a jail sentence. Almost all of them are either awaiting trial or waiting months at a time for prison bed space to open up.

Prisons can't let people out fast enough to keep up with the number of new convicts even though our legislature is bending over backwards to come up with ways to let more and more out earlier than before. It's really getting ridiculous. They keep passing tougher laws to send more people to prison for longer sentences than ever and at the same time they have to keep coming up with ways for them to serve smaller and smaller percentages of their sentences because we can't afford to keep adding new prison beds at the rate we've been adding them the last couple of decades.

Shoot, overcrowding is so bad now that our parole board has all but given up on revoking parole. People practically have to kill someone to get their parole revoked nowadays. Burglarizing a home, stealing a car, forging a hundred checks, none of that is enough to get parole revoked for more than a piddly 60 day "technical violation" these days. To get a real revocation takes a death penalty offense or an offense in the next highest statutory classification below a death penalty crime now because our prisons are so overcrowded. The average sentence people actually serve is now actually decreasing rather than increasing because we've gone too nutty with locking people up and used up all the bed space on stupid minor offenses in recent decades. And those committing misdemeanors for which they would have rightfully gotten jail time for only a few years ago are now getting slapped on the wrist instead because since the prisons are so overcrowded our jails are now overflowing with people awaiting prison beds. Someday hopefully it will dawn on us that prisons and county jails are a limited resource that we should use wisely.

When we lock up a greater per capita percentage of our people than any other country in the world and have in fact more people in total behind bars than any country in the world, includinhg huge countries like China, Russia, and India, we're going to feel the financial impact of that. My God, our people make up about 5% of the world's population yet about 25% of the people behind bars are locked up right here in the land of the free. This doesn't come cheap. This "liberal" use of prison is not "conservative." It's not the old way from the "good old days."

What we are doing now is entirely unprecedented, a radical departure from our old ways. We now lock up several times more people than we ever did in our entire history prior to 1979 or so. This is a fad, an unhealthy one at that. Sheriff Joe Arpaio is nothing but a publicity hound riding the wave. He has populist support for his tent city jail, but in real life we can't keep this crap going. We can't keep locking people up at the ever increasing rate we've been locking them up. This is costing us a fortune and at least from what I'm seeing a probably most of the people we are locking up are coming out worse than they were to begin with. Prison especially rarely turns a bad person into a good person. In real life what is more likely to happen is that a screwed up person goes to prison and comes out even more screwed up than he ever was before. He's likely to be raped and violated in a variety of ways. He's likely get jailhouse tattoos from head to toe and come out even less able to get a decent job than he was before. If he's black he'll join the Muslim Brotherhood or some other gang for protection. If he's white he'll join some meth dealing white supremacist group or another gang for protection. Mexicans and others do the same. Almost all of them seem to come out with even worse attitudes. The rarest of all is the guy who comes out changed for the better, especially when it comes to those going to state prisons rather than those who spend a little time in a county jail. I'm telling you, from years working in the criminal justice system what I am seeing is that the only thing prison really does well is keep the really dangerous guys away from the rest of us as long as they are kept there. Sentencing more and more to those places and having to let them all out earlier and earlier to make room for new convicts is counterproductive.

Right now the the most apparent problem with what we are doing is the hefty financial price. Mark my words though, as time goes one we'll see that we pay much higher societal costs on top of these financial costs for sending so many of our own to institutions of higher criminal learning where they learn new criminal skills, make new criminal contacts, suffer deviant behavior inducing abuse, and further develop that criminal attitude of taking what they can get no matter who they hurt and blaming others for the bad situations they find themselves in rather than taking responsibility for their actions and making the appropriate changes in the way they conduct lives. I see this over and over again. Prison tends to make people worse people than they were before they went in.

It's time for us to start putting some science into this and really start thinking about what we are doing. There are people who should be locked up for the good of us all, the longer the better. In order to up as long as we possibly can those who really should be locked up for the good of us all, we are going to have to start prioritizing a lot better than we do today. I hope to see us do just that, and therefore am glad to see us struggling in my county and my state with prison/jail overcrowding. That makes people have to start thinking realistically. So far though people around here still only seem to be thinking about the county jail, which we all pay for with property and sales taxes. If the city and the county had to pay for all or at least a part of the costs of putting so many in our state prisons, we'd probably see a lot more prudent decisions on the part of local jurors and judges with respect to prison sentences meted out. If I were king I'd make county governments share in state prison costs for those sentenced to prison from the respective counties. If that happened we'd see a lot of changes in the way we decide who should go to prison and for how long. As it is our county can and does sentence people to prison at a rate far higher than either the state's per capita average or the national per capita average. If locals could see that that actually costs them money, that would change in a heartbeat.

[jospehm20]

I agree completely.

[jospehm20]

That is how I remember it also.

[jospehm20]

I guess I do not understand your point. If the dogs had their shots up to date and their tags, the police man shooting at them would somehow be more acceptable? Are you saying that if a cop decides to cut across my yard he has the right to kill my dogs just for being there? Even if they are on my property and not bothering anybody at the time? Will they knock on my door and give me time to let them in before hand? I expect my dogs to challenge uninvited trespassers, that is one reason they are there in the first place. I do not believe that a policeman has the right to shoot my dogs on my property just to facilitate his desire to cut across my yard. I am sorry but the "whole story" in this case still sucks, in my oopinion.

[SampleMan]

are you seriously comparing murder and rape to drug use?

Yes. Most of the crime, thuggery, and murder is directly tied to the drug trade, as is forced prostitution (rape). I'm not at all impressed with "casual users" who simply finance the criminal organizations.

Again, my point is that if you want to legalize drug use, argue for it on its own merits. I'm not an advocate, so I'd be happy to accomodate you.

Abuse in search and seizure is a separate issue. It shouldn't be used as a red herring for legalizing drugs.

[beezdotcom]

But it doesn't appear that this puppy-stomping/pet shooting behavior occurs at any other time than these WOD transactions.

The article cites the dogs shot at Waco...while the BATF was involved, I don't think that was directly a WOD event.

[robertpaulsen]

"When we lock up a greater per capita percentage of our people than any other country in the world ..."

Cry me a river. We happen to have more freedom than the other countries you mentioned, so you can expect more scumbags to take advantage of it. You want less crime, then let's see you advocate for more machine gun carrying cops on every street corner -- more intrusions, more searches, less freedom. Yeah, just what I thought, you gutless wonder.

Second, countries like the UK have this concept called a "caution", wheby first offenders don't even see a court, much less serve time. This applies to assault, burglary, robbery, fraud, criminal damage, AND sexual offenses. Download child porn, a caution.

Now, you want to free up space, again, let's see you advocate for a similar sysytem here in the US. Let's see you advocate for letting robbers, sexual offenders, and those who physically assault others off with a slap on the wrist verbal no-no, never even seeing a courtroom. Boy, your job would be easier, now wouldn't it?

And stop your God-awful whining.

[JTN]

Please add me to the libertarian list.

You're on.

[JTN]

Most of the crime, thuggery, and murder is directly tied to the drug trade

Obviously, this is because drugs are illegal.

[robertpaulsen]

"I guess I do not understand your point."

I'm saying that the portrayal of these dogs as "pooches" was disingenuous, at best. The author mislead the reader by implying these little defenseless, harmless "pooches" minding their own business were shot and killed by this jackbooted thug who had no right at all to be in THEIR domain to begin with, and my intent was to portray the facts.

RTFA. These junkyard dogs were strays, mixed breed, unlicensed and untagged. They attacked the officer who was performing his duty. He shot AT them in self-defense, and injured one.

Now, if you have dogs that do this -- you think it's OK for your unleashed dogs to attack and maul and send to the hospital anyone who happens to place a foot on your property -- then be prepared for the consequences, even if those consequences are "unfair".

Now, back to my point. If the author was misleading us with this incident, how many of his other tear-jerking "stories" are untrue?

[JTN]

this jackbooted thug who had no right at all to be in THEIR domain to begin with

He didn't.