[Alpha One]

The dog came out and made a beeline for the cop. The cop was backing up when the dog lunged out of the right hand corner of the frame at the cop. It took three seconds from when the dog left the car. It was not "walking around in a curious playful manner".

Take another look at the video. The dog comes out of the car, runs off towards the guardrail wagging his tail with no indication of viciousness such as snarling or barking, THEN presumably circles towards the cop off of the right side of the screen. Also notice the big brave policemen with shotguns pointed at the heads of the mother, father, and son, who were all on their knees handcuffed with hands behind their backs. It could have easily been one of them that had their heads blown off if either of the two cops with shotguns had sneezed. This is WAY over the edge, and these cops don't deserve to carry spit balls, let alone loaded guns.

[Hatteras]

The whole "felony stop" was way over the edge and the dog would have been okay if the cops had made some effort to verify if a crime had even occurred. Guilty, guilty, guilty. But I want to know what kind of dog this actually was besides a "mixed-breed bulldog" before I convict. Think about this, the police officer who shot the dog was approximately 25 to 30 feet from the open front passenger door (I'm considering the length of the car and the apparent distance the officer was from the back of the Smoak's bumper not to mention that he was off to the right out of the picture frame).

Now, the time it took to cover that distance for the dog, including his little jaunt through the field out of the picture frame until he met his demise, was 3 seconds. He wasn't heading out for a frolick in the field. Also, the last thing you see before the gun blast was the dog lunging up at the cop. And the last thing I "thought" I heard was a growl cut short by the blast. I say "I thought" because I can not confirm that is what I heard due to other noises.

CNN put a big white circle over the dog at that point so it looks like the dog was approaching the policeman to maybe get his ears scratched. The guy on our local talk show today was telling the audience that he saw the CNN tape and the dog just walked up to the cop wagging his tail and the cop shot it, despite not seeing the unedited clip where you can see the dog lunging at the officer. He didn't mention that the cop was out of the camera frame and actually retreating into frame when he shot the dog and the cop next to him was raising his gun to fire. Did both officers decide it would be neat to shoot somebody's family dog or was the dog baring his teeth as he leapt up at them? That's something I want to know because the video did not give that answer. MY point again, is that the video does not tell the whole story. Compounding that, people are seeing and hearing things in that video that just don't exist, playing Dr. Doolittle and telling us just what the dog was thinking as it leapt from the car and so on.

Just show me his veternarian records so we can see how old, young, big or small he is and how did his vet "describe" him if he was a mixed breed. That's all.