On Police Shooting Dogs.

Caleb posted about police shooting dogs. I responded there, but decided to bring it here as a post, as well.


This is an emotional topic.
I'm going to speak here as a cop, but also as an academic who has put 20 years into Criminal Justice studies. I ask that people not take this personally, and please don't take my words as those of all police.
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1. Animals are property.
This one statement is going to get a lot of people riled up that I say it, but it's a fact. They are owned.  If someone takes your dog without your permission, and that person is caught, then they are charged with Theft, not Kidnapping.  Animals including dogs are bought and sold at a brisk rate.  
People know this to be a fact, but they cannot embrace it, when their dog is a family member to them. This is about emotion. Emotion, we know, is neither right nor wrong-- it simply is. But it can play merry hell with an equation built only on facts.


2. Emotions seem to trump logic.
If a cop serves a felony warrant, and uses a sledge hammer to break open a beautiful oaken door, people say, "Well, that's a shame about the door, but if the warrant was in order and the homeowner wasn't opening up, then it was time to open it however." If that same cop is met by a scared and aggressive dog that is doing what arguably is its job (protecting the household), but which is also endangering the cop with bloodshed, and the officer uses his weapon to stop what is the threat of what is, after all, property, from hurting him, the same logic often isn't used. It is short circuited by emotion.


3. Officers should not have to be bitten first.
I have been bitten on the job. I've gone to the ER and been treated and then bought new $70 uniform pants out of my own pocket, and never gotten recompensed for it. I've had dogs nip at me, and come charging into my taser and baton. I will die with clear scars left on my body that I have obtained from dogs attacking me while on the job. On a couple of occasions, I'll be honest with you: I should have shot the dog.

I have heard it said by people upset about a shooting that the dog hadn't bitten the officer yet. Given a large enough dog, a grown man can be permanently injured by a dog attack. Often it is shocking how small a dog can render lifelong injuries to a man. Without getting into breeds, we all know the breeds of dogs that are used the most for dog fighting, which are nowhere near the largest breeds. Sometimes a 40 lb dog is enough to permanently harm a man. Consider also the biological weapons in the dog's bite. Dogs left to roam and attack are often the same kind of dogs not getting their shots.


4. Officers should be trained better about dogs.
Jeff Cooper once said that a properly-trained police officer ought to be able to deal with a single dog attacking him. For the most part, I don't disagree, and that's frankly the main reason that I've never shot a dog that was attacking me while on the job. I have tazed them, and I have used my expandable baton, and I have used my steel-toed boots on them. A lot of the reason that I have not shot dogs when I would have been approved to do so by policy is because of #2, above: Emotions Trump Logic. I had a lieutenant get on to me about tazing my second dog attacking me in 2 months (both were pit bulls, and I promise you, both were in the immediate act of trying to get a mouthful of me. This wasn't a dog trotting up to check me out. One was airborne at me when the barbs hit.), because Taser cartridges are more expensive than pistol cartridges. He may have been speaking tongue in cheek, but I pointed out that I was able to resolve the problem without having our department featured in the news for "Another Cop Shoots Another Dog," and that's a win.  (Also, I was in a vey residential area, and I don't like skipping pistol bullets around if I can help it.)


I will say, though, that modern expandable batons were mostly built more as pain compliance devices than as bone-breaking weapons, and they are surprisingly ineffective at rendering incapacitating injuries. To this end, the old second-growth hickory batons were FAR superior. The main feature of an expandable baton is that it is always on the belt of an officer. Strangely, most cops seem to forget about it. That's a two-pound chunk that they carry on their belt every workday for years, but they literally forget to use it. This is frankly a training issue.


5. There are times to shoot the dog.
When there is more than one dog coming after the officer, all bets are off. It is my professional opinion that packed-up dogs attacking a person need to be met with deadly force, unless we're talking about Chihuahuas or Pekinese or teacup varieties of canines. (In which case, proper footwork is key.) 
During documented high-risk incidents, when the dog comes after an officer engaging in something that needs his undivided attention, shooting a dog may be the best option, keeping in mind #1. If the officer is swinging away with his baton to defend himself against a dog, he is not focusing on the other threats around him, be they a felon to arrest, or traffic. This last paragraph is not going to make me popular, because of #2.


6. We could bear rethinking the dog issue.
Because the dogs are such a hot topic, and so ubiquitous, we might re-think ways of dealing with them? How? I don't really know. Shin and forearm guards for warrant service where dogs are known to be come to mind, but I really question how effective they would be. I will tell you that tasers are of questionable use if you don't have a means of securing the animal while it's down. Catch poles might be a good piece of kit to bring. Dart guns are basically non-starters, because the amount of sedative that will put a dog down immediately is generally the amount of sedative that will kill the dog. Also, these things are time and resource-consuming. When you are going in to extract a felon, things need to move along rickety-tick.


For officers making a routine call upon a house for an administrative or non-emergency purpose, teaching them to survey the area before walking into the yard is worth doing. If a dog moves up aggressively, back off an call animal control.
We need to keep in mind Robert Peel's 2nd, 3rd, and 4th principles.


7. A lot of this problem could be fixed by talking to the dog owners.
I've already said that we need to do away with no-knock warrants except in hostage situations.
Knock on the door. Call them.  Tell them that you need them to put their dog up. Sometimes that's what it takes. It kills the element of surprise, but not the dog. This isn't always possible, but it's possible sometimes:
"Hello?"
"Hey, Mr. Smith? Bob Smith of 123 Any Street?"
"Yeah? Who's this?"
"This is the police. We're out front. And out back. We have a warrant for your arrest/ to search the house. We are in uniform, and in marked patrol units. We need you to put the dog away and come on out. If we have to come in, and the dog attacks us, we'll be forced to shoot the dog, and none of us ever wants that. Please comply immediately."
"Okay, I'll put the dog in the kennel/bathroom/closet. Don't shoot. I'm coming out."
This happens. Not all the time. Sometimes it's not feasible. But it does happen. Maybe it could happen a little more.


I know of one incident in which someone whom I know personally was actually held hostage by a family member of hers, who had put their pit bulls in different bedrooms around the house to prevent SWAT from entering. He was drunk, and actually fired random shots during the stand-off. He finally permitted his hostage to leave. After the hostage-taker finally gave himself up, the former hostage convinced the officers --who were going in to clear the house-- to permit her to secure the dogs. The dogs were upset and would have attacked the strangers when they entered the bedrooms unaccompanied by her. My congratulations to the flexibility and professionalism of the North Richland Hills Police Department for handling that situation the way that they did.


8. Finally, I will say that Generalizations Fail.
When we say "There is NEVER a reason to" do thus and so, we are almost always stating an error of fact.  When we say, "An officer should ALWAYS respond to X with Y" we will pretty much always be forgetting about an exception. But guidelines would be a good thing.


It would be really nice if people-- thoughtful people-- didn't have a basis to state that it looks like some cops basically just look like they wanted an excuse to fire their firearm. On the vast, vast majority of the time, it's not true. Let's be sure and make that point by finding ways to limit when we have to do so.

Thoughts on violence.

--This nation is split right now. There is little in the way of a "conversation about guns and violence." It is two sides, squaring off. It's not pretty, and it's not really effective.

--Under the New Public Service model of governance, we are supposed to engage in a dialogue until we decide what to do, without regard to completing our goal, or achieving a real consensus.

--Those of us interested in maintaining the right to keep and to bear arms are acting calmer than those who blame firearms for the violence in which they are used.
This isn't because we're less upset. 

--Belief that ONE SINGLE POLICY will stop the violence is pretty naive. Thus, even though I believe that there are things that we can and probably should do to reduce the violence, I don't present them and then nod self-assuredly and declare "that's what will finally fix the problem."

--I've said before and I will say again that this nation has a serious problem in identifying and managing our mentally ill. We don't even deal with the emergent ones.

--If I truly believed that we could put the genie back in the bottle, and eliminate all firearms from this planet in an attempt to rid the planet of gun violence, I might well consider it, even though I agree with Marko's excellent essay, here. But it's not possible, so why entertain the mental exercise? If we're going to do that, why not settle invisibility versus flight for a superpower?

--If guns are the problem, why is my life not steeped in violence? Even though I literally am dispatched to every call involving violence in my jurisdiction for half of every other day, I have seen very little in the way of gun violence in the last 12 years of service. I've never been shot at. I've never shot at anyone. I've never arrested anyone for intentionally shooting at another person (true story!). I've only a handful of times arrested people for pointing guns at others. This is in Texas, where private ownership of firearms is almost unrestricted: No limit to number of guns, no registration of guns, no waiting period, no state restriction on private sales, no state restriction on ammunition* or magazines. If you get it federally registered, you can even own an automatic weapon.

--Some folks will see that above comment and say, "well, he works in a small town, so that's different." Well, which is it? Either we're back-woods hicks who are armed to the teeth and seething in violence, or I'm working for Mayberry, and we all get along so great, no one would ever be so unkind as to shoot someone else.  It must not be the guns, though, because EVERY home here seems to have a collection of firearms.

--Firearms were virtually uncontrolled before 1934, then more so in 1968, and more so in 1986. Yet school shootings have increased almost exponentially since just the late 1990s. Why? Yes, there are more guns. Yes, more people live in urban environments. But those aren't the answer. The problem of mass shootings has grown far faster than the rate of gun ownership. Lt. Colonel Dave Grossman, when I saw him speak, opined that the problem grew in direct proportion to the proliferation of first-person shooter video games. Hm.  I don't think that blaming the games themselves is the answer. But I'll for damn sure agree that there's an inured effect upon the players to distance themselves from the perceived consequences of their actions. 

I see evidence of dissociative behavior among youth that I didn't see much before. Youngsters engaged in online debate move quickly to direct each other to kill themselves. We've got individuals scattered among us who genuinely don't see other people as real. We've always had such sociopaths (for such they are), but it seems like we've started distilling them, and creating a higher likelihood that we'll have to deal with them.

--I am real. And so are you.

--The world will never be Nerf'd. We cannot stop violence, much. But maybe we can attenuate it. Maybe we can actually get a handle on what we can do to help reduce the chance that future sick persons will decide to destroy others.  I'm going to try. Please try in your way, too.

--Let me know what you think. I'm interested.
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*Except armor-piercing handgun ammunition.

HIPAA

"HIPAA" is the dirtiest word I hear, some days. And given the profane things discussed in my day-to-day life, that's impressive.

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act was an important piece of legislature, passed too late in a time when people had suffered from their healthcare information under one insurance agency not being properly shared with another.  Part of that improper information sharing was the OVER-sharing of patients' private information. This law had provisions to protect Grampaw from having the highlights of his colostomy broadcast throughout the parish, or news of his grandaughter Suzie's prescription for antibiotics for a social disease picked up on spring break making its way around campus from the quack shack.

As soon as it was passed in 1996, everyone began to focus on the privacy concerns in HIPAA. So much so, in fact, that I've seen more than one healthcare professional misquote it as "HIPPA," for "Health Information Privacy Protection Act."[sic] Which does not exist.

If they can't even get the NAME OR THE ACRONYMN right, how are they expected to get the content of that large document right? Answer? They don't. I've had more garbage told to me under the umbrella of "We can't tell you that. Sorry. HIPAA."

I once was on duty on a deep night shift in the early aughts, when Dave, a buddy of mine from one of my undergraduate Criminal Justice classes and a sergeant for another police department in our county, was given a rather difficult roadblock to deal with. See, Dave had to work a major multicar crash caused by a drunk driver going the wrong way on a major highway. Dave and his comrades blocked the highway, saw that the wounded were transported by EMS, and had the highway cleared by the wrecker agencies.  Part of Dave's duties was to create a landing zone (LZ) for a private helicopter ambulance to land to pick up the suspected drunk driver, who was badly injured in the wreck. After it was all cleared up, Dave sensibly enough radioed our county dispatcher and inquired as to which hospital he should go for the mandatory blood draw that he was going to perform on the driver, who was now a suspect for Intoxication Assault. The county dispatcher called the helicopter ambulance dispatcher, who then, unbelievably, informed the county dispatcher that she could not release that information because of "HIPAA." 

Dave was audibly frustrated over the radio. I went to the PD, printed out the exceptions when medical information could be released, circled the section of Law Enforcement Exceptions ("...to identify or locate a suspect, fugitive, material witness, or missing person..."), circled the pertinent portion twice with a black Magic Marker, and faxed it to Dave's PD, to the County Dispatcher, and to the office that I thought might be the dispatcher for Moronic Private Helo Medical Transport. Then I sat down and read the document. It wasn't that hard.

The other morning, while visiting my partner in the hospital, I saw his wife smile as he happily dug into the fruit and yogurt that I'd fetched him from the cafeteria, and I whipped out my camera phone to take a quick picture, mostly to send to both their phones. The ICU nurse jumped in, speedy-quick: "You can't take his picture without his explicit permission. It's against HIPAA."

Okay, now look: I appreciate her looking out for my buddy. I really do. More than I can express. I appreciate that my partner isn't quite as fully alert right this minute as he is when he's at his best. But she had stood right there when he had told the doc that I was his partner, like family, and was thus privy to the doctor's briefing him. She had heard me jokingly suggest that he really wanted a Foley catheter while there, and she had heard him laughing with it. I'm on his team.  I come in peace. I mean him no harm. His wife, who saw me taking the shot, had leaned in close to him and smiled for the picture.

But most importantly, I'm not subject to HIPAA. I'm not a medical professional. I wasn't handling his information. I'm in no way licensed, medically. It doesn't apply to me.

"Consent is not needed for photography done by the patient’s family members or friends..."

Take what you will from it, I guess.

The history of our national day of giving thanks is disputed.

It has become fashionable lately for people with (Midnight Oil's "Beds Are Burning" playing on infinite repeat) to tell us that Thanksgiving is a terrible celebration of the massacre of the trans-historic indigenous peoples of North America. There's quite the movement afoot to banish the holiday, or to reinvent it as a day of sorrow and atonement.

Hey, if that's all you've got in your box, then I guess it's going to rattle around a bit.

If you're an atheist, then the question arises: to whom are you giving thanks? Certainly not to God. Okay then: how about just appreciating how you got the things for which you may count among your blessings? Somebody likely helped you get there. Thank them. If you did it all by yourself, thank the person in your mirror. Saying "thank you" is polite.

I've always liked the way that William Bradford looked at Thanksgiving: as a celebration of capitalism as a way to get through the harsh winters. It seems that before, the Plymouth Bay Colony had tried collectivism of corn, and that hadn't worked out; the hardest workers got no more than the shirkers, and they had almost starved the year before. So when they tried the concept of working for one's self, and trading for whatever was needed, the colony flourished.

It is interesting to note that some of the colonists worked for the local Indians, planting and such, to get their seed corn. I've heard one reference to them working "as slaves" for the indigenous people, but slaves don't generally get to walk away with any profit for their labors. This was an exchange of labor for commodity. That yellow seed corn was truly their specie.

Here at Better And Better, we try to see the optimistic side of things*. So on this day of Thanks Giving, I'm asking you all to simply see what is good in your life, and spend at least part of the day loving that.

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*We've also been known to fail at this, on occasion.

Define Tea Party Movement for me.

I'm seeing very, very wide variation in perceived planks of the Tea Party movement.

I personally have considered it to be a movement that I would affiliate myself with, because it was based on the idea that we are overtaxed, and that our governments had best not be using our taxes on things not directly mandated in their mission. Fiscal conservatism, in other words.

But I'm being told that Tea Partiers are:

1--Pro Gun (Well, why not? But is that a mandate?)
2--Pro Republican (Wait-- I thought that the Tea Party movement was critical of the Republican Party?)
3--Anti Democrat (Wait-- more so than the Republicans?)
4--Pro Christian (Why? Did Christ say "No taxation without representation!")
5--Anti Gay (You know how they love to spend, spend, spend! That's why all gays are poor, as opposed to us Breeders...)
6--Pro-Whitey
7--Anti freedom of speech
8--Pro War (but wait-- war costs money)
9--Anti Abortion
10--Pro-Death Penalty
11--And maybe, if they get around to it, pro-balanced budget and pro-reduced spending.

So what is it, folks? What's absolutely intrinsic to the Tea Party Movement? Please note whether you identify with it, in your answers.

The thing about freedom and equality...

...it spreads.

My co-worker came into the police department this morning to relieve me. While I finished up on a DWI report, he checked his web-based email, which popped up the news. “So,” he said with what I perceived as a smirk, “New York state has made it legal for gays to marry…!”

“Good. Maybe we’ll be next,” I said.

“I know, right?!?” said my conservative, VERY hetero, recently-married cop buddy.

Despite the stereotypes and the expectations of the opposition, many, many of us stand behind equality. More than the bigots know. That’s part of their downfall.

My friend may well have been trying to set up a derisive joke, but the things he said over the next few seconds told me that really, he'd just been waiting to hear someone else say that they support equality. I'm glad that I could answer that call. I think that he'll feel more empowered to next time start that discussion with, "It's about damned time."

Talk about rape a bit, won't you?

Yet again, my friend LabRat intelligently opens discussion on a difficult topic. Rape.