by German Lopez
Adam Arroyo was at work on June
3, 2013, when he heard the news. "Adam, I'm sorry," he recalled his
landlord telling him. "They killed your dog."
Arroyo's landlord wasn't
talking about burglars. "They" were the Buffalo, New York, police,
and they had barged into his apartment, torn through his belongings, and killed
Cindy, his two-year-old pit bull, during a botched raid.
When he got home, he said,
"it looked like a tornado hit. My dog was missing, and there were bullet
holes and blood all over the walls."
Police later said that Cindy
had been "aggressive." But Arroyo, a 30-year-old Iraq war veteran,
insists the dog was chained when he left for work that day. It also turned out
that police may have hit the wrong apartment — Arroyo believes they were
targeting a neighbor who allegedly sold illicit drugs.
"That dog, everywhere I
went, she wanted to go with me. Those police, they don't know what they
did."
Arroyo and Cindy are not alone.
The Buffalo Police Department shot 92 dogs between January 2011 and September
2014, 73 of which died from their wounds, according to a recent story from
local news station WGRZ. Twenty-six of those shootings were the work of one
officer — and nearly all of those dogs died. For many critics, including
Arroyo, these shootings are a symptom of a larger problem in law enforcement.
"These police officers think
they're above the law," he said.
Since the summer, a national
discussion about the way officers use force on the job and whom they use it
against has dominated the news, sparked by the killing of several unarmed black
men by police — long a deep concern among civil rights activists. The deaths of
Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, Eric Garner in Staten Island, and, most
recently, 12-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland, at the hands of local police
have sparked a roiling, emotional debate about the latitude police are given to
take lives, even when it is later discovered that a situation did not warrant
it. Police officers say this latitude is essential for their safety and the
ability to perform their jobs effectively.
This human toll is the primary
concern in protesting a system that gives law enforcement what many believe is
too much freedom to take lives and property. But for years, one of the ways
this multilayered story has played out is in the killing of dogs by police.
Police kill an untold number of
dogs a year
It's hard to know how many dogs
are shot by police — we don't even have a firm idea of how many people are shot
by police. But it's not just Buffalo. According to a 2011 report presented to
the US Department of Justice, a majority of shootings in most of the surveyed
police departments involve animals, particularly dogs. And based on media
reports, hundreds of dogs are shot by police each year.
Police in Milwaukee killed
roughly 48 dogs per year between 2000 and 2008, according to the Associated
Press. Officers in southwest Florida shot 111 dogs between 2009 and 2012, the
News-Press found. In metro Atlanta, according to a WSB-TV investigation, police
were responsible for the deaths of nearly 100 dogs from 2010 to 2012. And
Chicago police killed approximately 90 dogs per year between 2008 and 2013, the
Chicago Tribune reported.
The Washington Post's Radley
Balko has written extensively about police-involved dog shootings — including
dogs that are leashed and unleashed, puppies and seniors, and big and small,
with breeds ranging from chihuahuas to Labradors. The topic has a blog,
Facebook page, and subreddit dedicated to it. Reports from advocates or people
who lost their dogs at the hands of police flow into these repositories on a
daily basis. Here are a few examples:
According to an email sent to
the blog Dogs that Cops Killed, Megan Hood's dog, Blossom, was killed by police
in Jonesboro, Texas. But Hood said she wasn't told about the police shooting
until later, after a private investigator contacted her. Instead, she said, the
city government initially told her that her dog had been hit by a car and that
the Texas Department of Transportation had incinerated the body.
Sean Kendall got a call one day
that Salt Lake City police had entered his yard and killed his Weimaraner,
Geist. Police officers said they were investigating a missing child report and
the dog acted aggressively, but Kendall said officers could have backed out of
the yard and closed the gate to protect themselves.
In one case caught on a body camera, a police
officer in north Texas called a dog over to him and then shot it multiple
times. The officer claimed the dog showed signs of aggression, but that is not
visible in the available footage.
Los Angeles County Sheriff's Deputies on
December 5 shot and killed a family's pregnant pit bull, even though they went
through a gate with a "beware of dog" sign, reported CBS Los Angeles.
The dog's owner said the dog never attacked the deputies and that the deputies
either hit the wrong home or were responding to a prank call.
Arroyo, now a manager at a
cleaning company and member of the National Guard, said he still mourns Cindy.
He moved out of his previous apartment, which was stained with bad memories and
Cindy's blood, and currently lives with his uncle. He feels like no one is
being held accountable for the shooting.
For Arroyo, Cindy's friendship
was a way to cope with his loneliness after serving in Iraq. Arroyo bought
Cindy from someone who intended to put her in dog fights. His initial goal was
to save Cindy, but he quickly fell in love with the dog.
"I feel like I rescued
her," Arroyo said. "But at the same time, she rescued me."
Buffalo Police officials didn't
respond to multiple inquiries about an internal investigation into Arroyo's
case. They previously refused to provide an update to WGRZ.
In an interview with WGRZ,
Buffalo Police Chief of Detectives Dennis Richards said the dog shootings made
up a small fraction of the thousands of calls Buffalo Police officers respond
to each year.
"Officers generally shoot
to live. We don't shoot to kill," Richards said. "It goes to the
officer's safety and the safety of other people."
When can police shoot dogs?
Cynthia Bathurst, co-founder
and director of animal advocacy group Safe Humane Chicago, said there's not a
noticeable pattern in these dog killings. She said she's heard of it happening
in domestic dispute cases, SWAT raids, and even traffic stops in which a dog is
in the car.
Almost all of these shootings
were later found to be justified. But animal activists believe that part of the
issue is that cops are allowed, under the law and department policy, to use
deadly force too easily. If an officer merely thinks a dog is going to bite or
attack him, he's allowed to shoot — even if a dog doesn't pose a threat to the
life of the officer or others. And since dogs are considered property under
most state laws, the legal standards of probable cause and objectively
reasonable belief that apply to human shootings don't apply to dogs and other pets.
Based on media reports,
hundreds of dogs are shot by police each year
Even an unjustified shooting
likely won't land a police officer in jail or prison. But dog owners can and do
resort to civil lawsuits to claim damages for shootings, under the argument
that killing a dog unlawfully is akin to illegally seizing or destroying
property. There have been reports of proposed settlements as high as $10,000 in
Salt Lake City; $30,000 in Riverside, California; and even $225,000 in
Minneapolis, in a case that involved two dead dogs.
Arroyo is now pursuing a
federal lawsuit against the city of Buffalo for the raid and his dog's death.
He said the city offered him $1,000, which he decided wasn't enough. But he
also insisted the lawsuit has nothing to do with money. His concern is holding
the city and police accountable for their mistake, he said, and the only way to
do that may be to force a big payout.
"To me, it's not about the
money," Arroyo said. "I'm not the only person going through
this."
Advocates want better police
training and standards
The Buffalo Police Department
doesn't train for encounters with dogs, WGRZ reported. Just two states —
Colorado and Illinois — require such training, said Bathurst, although police
departments in other states might do so voluntarily or under local laws. The
hope for reformers is to get more cities, states, and police departments to
adopt similar standards.
Arroyo said he believes it's
only a matter of time until things change. "This is going to break,"
he said. "There's too many incidents for nothing to happen."
One barrier to change, Bathurst
said, is that police overestimate the threat posed by dogs. The number of
reported dog bites has decreased by as much as 75 to 90 percent, depending on
the city, since the 1970s, according to data compiled by the National Canine
Research Council (NCRC). And dog bite fatalities are extremely rare, resulting
in 32 deaths in 2011, NCRC reported.
"We don't want to
understate the importance of decreasing this number [of fatal dog bites],"
Bathurst said. "But they are, in general, minor."
The National Canine Research
Council and Safe Humane Chicago developed a series of videos that educates
police officers on how to read different breeds' body language, ways to get out
of a situation without resorting to force, and tools — such as Tasers, batons,
fire extinguishers, and chemical sprays — that can be used to stop a dog
without shooting.
At the very least, animal
proponents say police departments should begin better tracking their encounters
with dogs. Currently, federal and state data is spotty and scant on
police-involved dog shootings.
Dog shootings further distrust
between communities and police
"When [these shootings]
occur, they get more and more attention, and there's more and more concern in
the community," said NCRC spokesperson Janis Bradley. "It leads to
dog owners mistrusting the police, which is bad for everybody — it's bad for
the police, bad for the community, and, of course, bad for the dog."
Police officers are found to be
legally justified almost every time they kill a dog, according to police
shooting watchers and various media reports on dog shootings.
But a legal argument does
nothing to repair community mistrust when police actions make people feel that
the law is either not on their side or only on the side of a chosen few. Police
are also found to be legally justified nearly every time they kill a person,
and yet the Pew Research Center found that about 61 percent of all Americans —
and 93 percent of black Americans — score police "only fair" or
"poor" on "using the right amount of force for each
situation."
For Arroyo, there is little
police could do to give him back what he lost.
"She was my best friend.
That dog, everywhere I went, she wanted to go with me. It breaks my heart,"
Arroyo said. "Those police, they don't know what they did."
