Tuesday, 15 Jul 2014 05:57 PM
By Sean PiccoliPolice officers
serving warrants and searching homes are shooting and killing household dogs at
an alarming rate across the country, but are rarely prosecuted or even investigated
for a violent act that leaves pet owners devastated, a lawyer told Newsmax TV
on Tuesday.
"It's even worse than,
'We're doing our job.' It's 'We don't care,' " New York criminal defense
attorney Richard Bruce Rosenthal told "MidPoint" host Ed Berliner.
"They see it as just an animal, just as a piece of property."
A spate of recent dog killings
by officers has drawn attention to how local law enforcement agencies handle
the presence of domesticated pets in the course of their duties.
In Baltimore, a city police
officer is facing charges for slitting the throat of a Shar-Pei that had bitten
somebody but was restrained when the officer allegedly killed it, the Daily
Mail reports.
Colorado passed a "Dog
Protection Act" in 2013 to help reduce fatal animal shootings by police,
the Huffington Post reports.
But Rosenthal said that by and
large when a search warrant is issued, "Most police departments have no
procedure in place — and no plans — to deal with the possibility of dogs being
present, other than to kill them."
Rosenthal also said dogs are
becoming casualties of an increasingly militarized, fear-based approach to
policing.
"When I was much younger,
there was a very different view of police," said Rosenthal.
"The police were someone
you went to for help when there was a problem. You didn't fear the police.
Nowadays, one needs to be afraid of the police, and it's a horrible, horrible
way for this country to become."
Rosenthal acknowledged that
some dogs are trained by their owners to be vicious. But he said police are
shooting dogs as a first resort, even when they pose little or no threat, or
when a dog — feeling threatened itself — acts protectively.
"Our law does recognize
that a dog has a right to be safe and to be secure in his property," said
Rosenthal. "When a police officer — or anyone, for that matter —
trespasses, to then suggest that they're justified in killing the dog because
the dog was not all warm and cuddly and friendly really stretches the
point."
Rosenthal said the killings will
stop "only when more and more of the families that have been abused this
way start suing and the courts start issuing large judgments against
municipalities."
