Excessive-Force Case Filed Over Lab Mix Who Dared to Sniff Police Dog's Butt

Seattleweekly.com ^ | January 11, 2011 | Nina Shapiro

[Immerito]

Police departments are perennially accused of excessive force--the poignant SPD shooting of Native American carver John Williams being just the latest example. Usually, however, the victims are human beings. Not so in an excessive-force case recently filed in federal court, which details the fatal shooting of a Labrador retriever mixed-breed dog named Slyder, allegedly for doing little more than sniffing the butt of a police dog.

[coon2000]

Cops are tax collectors with open carry. They are useless power mad underachievers for the most part.

[mountn man]

Does a cop inform you that he has a window/dashboard mount camera???

[CodeToad]

“Police are by constitutional construct, a reactive force to crimes committed, not a preventive force.”

Where the Hell did you get that from? Enforcement of anything is not after the fact.

[Kimmers]

“Sniffing butts is how dogs say hello.”

and I glad that is a trait we do not share with our canine friends....

[Immerito]

Of course, the liberals are happy with this development; everytime a bad cop gets away with it, the other corrupt cops are encouraged to commit such crimes.

I wonder if the defend-bad-cops-no-matter-what crowd here realizes what will happen when the bad cops turn on their own defenders.

“Thank you for your service, Citizen. Your services are no longer required.”

[blackdog]

What's legal or illegal is not up to the police. Laws are enforced by the courts. If cops are supposed to enforce laws, then why do we have courts? If cops can enforce laws, then we really have some super-cops out there, because I cannot imagine how they can process hundreds of thousands of pages of laws per second to "enforce" them? By circumstance, the average suzie public breaks the law every day. We have so many laws on the books now that the cops are ignoring violations of most laws while "enforcing" others. They "enforce" them in a rather disproportinate and inconsistant manner.

Sure, cops can enforce traffic laws which we all must take tests to prove we have a working knowledge of them before we can drive. Of course cops should arrest someone for an obvious crime which someone has committed while being observed to do so, but enforcing laws is a reach. It may be a phrase which we've woven into regular speech patterns today, but I do believe the more accurate description of their charter is to "uphold the law". There is a huge difference in the arrangement of the words.