This morning, three New York City police officers have been wounded by gunfire. A civilian woman has been shot in the arm by police. What led to this?
A group of six NYPD officers opened fire in an apartment hallway on a pit bull which came out of an apartment when they rang the doorbell.
The Police Department’s chief spokesman, Paul J. Browne, said that a sergeant and five officers had been sent to the apartment at 1806 First Avenue, near East 93rd Street, after someone called 911 and reported an assault in Apt. 11-J. The caller said the assailant had a gun, Mr. Browne said.
The officers, from the 19th Precinct and the Midtown North Task Force, rang the doorbell and the door opened wide enough for the pit bull to race out, Mr. Brown said. Three of the officers opened fire, Mr. Browne said. He said it was not immediately clear how many bullets they had discharged.
The bullets richocheted in the close quarters of the hallway. One officer from the task force was hit by a bullet fragment under his right eye. Another fragment hit the hand of a second officer. An officer from the 19th Precinct was hit on the side of his nose.
The woman who had opened the door, whose name was not immediately released, was hit in the arm.
The wounded woman was arrested by the NYPD for having let out the dog, who was killed in the shooting. None of the six people in the apartment had a gun.
This is hardly the only time recently when police officers have killed a dog in the course of their duties. Two weeks ago in Kingsport, TN, a police officer shot and killed a fenced-in pit bull. A few days before that, Prince George’s County Sherrifs cleared themselves of any wrong-doing in a raid on the home of Berwyn Heights mayor Cheye Calvo, a wrong-door raid which has attracted national attention. And the past two weeks is barely the tip of the iceberg.
Radley Balko, author of Overkill: The Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America, has, for quite some time, been documenting the alarming increase in the use of lethal force against a wide range of breeds of family dogs:
One of the most appalling cases occurred in Maricopa County, Arizona, the home of Joe Arpaio, self-proclaimed "toughest sheriff in America." In 2004 one of Arpaio's SWAT teams conducted a bumbling raid in a Phoenix suburb. Among other weapons, it used tear gas and an armored personnel carrier that later rolled down the street and smashed into a car. The operation ended with the targeted home in flames and exactly one suspect in custody--for outstanding traffic violations.
But for all that, the image that sticks in your head, as described by John Dougherty in the alternative weekly Phoenix New Times, is that of a puppy trying to escape the fire and a SWAT officer chasing him back into the burning building with puffs from a fire extinguisher. The dog burned to death.
In a massive 1998 raid at a San Francisco housing co-op, cops shot a family dog in front of its family, then dragged it outside and shot it again.
When police in Fremont, California, raided the home of medical marijuana patient Robert Filgo, they shot his pet Akita nine times. Filgo himself was never charged.
Last October police in Alabama raided a home on suspicion of marijuana possession, shot and killed both family dogs, then joked about the kill in front of the family. They seized eight grams of marijuana, equal in weight to a ketchup packet.
In January a cop en route to a drug raid in Tampa, Florida, took a short cut across a neighboring lawn and shot the neighbor's two pooches on his way. And last May, an officer in Syracuse, New York, squeezed off several shots at a family dog during a drug raid, one of which ricocheted and struck a 13-year-old boy in the leg. The boy was handcuffed at gunpoint at the time.
There was a dog in the ragweed bust I mentioned, too. He got lucky: He was only kicked across the room.
Look, even as a dog lover and owner, I understand that police shootings of dogs is not the worst problem with our criminal justice system. But this is still a terrible, and wholly preventable, tragedy going on throughout our nation. As last night’s incident so aptly demonstrates, police officers firing weapons has a high probability of killing or wounding others than the intended targets. Pit bulls have a (largely undeserved) bad reputation, which may increase the amount of fear felt by the officers, but that doesn’t mitigate the real risk to human life that such use of firearms creates. And many, if not most, of these dogs are no risk to anyone, be they the black labs of Mayor Calvo or the terrier mix killed by an Oklahoma police officer in this video. Worse still, there is some evidence that the killing of animals leads some individuals to devalue human life, which is a trait we need to do our best to limit in our police officers.
The answer to this growing epidemic of police shootings of dogs is better training for police officers, many of whom receive less than two weeks of firearms training per year. But we are unlikely to see that change unless we view the killings of dogs and the woundings of civilians as something worth making a fuss about.