*The slaying of Jameson, a 2-year-old Saint Bernard, Golden retriever, and Doodle mix, by the LAPD during a family celebration over the Knicks’ championship win is not unique. Nor is the reaction to the pet’s slaying by officers unique in two respects.
One is the loud outcry over the dog’s slaying. The other is that Jameson is only one of many dogs, many like him, household pets, which are slain yearly by police, and that includes the LAPD. That’s not all. One survey of dog shootings found that nearly half of all police use of deadly force involved the shooting of dogs. In fact, the LAPD has a particularly high dog kill rate even by the standards of other police departments’ dog slayings.
Between 2010 and 2016, according to a Department of Justice estimate, more than a quarter of LAPD shootings were not of humans but of dogs. The slaying of Jameson is stark evidence that dogs are still very much fair game for a police bullet if and when the officer feels the animal poses an imminent threat.
Just how many dogs do police slay? The DOJ study found the police kill an astounding twenty to thirty dogs a day. That’s right, a day, not a year, or even a month, but a day. The yearly kill total amounts to roughly ten thousand plus dogs slain. In some years, that exceeds the number of officer-involved shootings of men and women.
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Police officials, when challenged on a dog slaying, almost always say that the officer feared for their safety. LAPD officials said pretty much the same thing about why officers shot Jameson. Often, they toss in a description of the dog as large, menacing, and ferocious. Jameson was initially described as a large dog; he wasn’t. But that characterization was enough to plant the image of a dog that was indeed the menace to the officer’s safety, that LAPD officials claim.
There’s another huge irony in the LAPD slaying of Jameson. Dogs are highly valued by police departments as integral to crime-fighting, whether at airports or on the streets in crowd control and other dicey street confrontation incidents.
The LAPD, like nearly all other police departments, has specialized K9 units. The dogs are well-trained, and certainly well cared for. There have been some reports of K9 abuse by some police dog handlers. But the norm generally is that dogs are well-protected.
That was not the case with Jameson, or the thousands of other dogs slain by the police, including a fair number by the LAPD yearly. The storm of protest and media attention over the slaying of Jameson was fast and furious. LAPD officials and L.A. Mayor Karen Bass have promised a thorough investigation. A GoFundMe for Jameson’s owners raised thousands.
But that doesn’t answer the bigger question. That is why the LAPD and other police agencies kill so many dogs each year under dubious circumstances. The even bigger question is what will the LAPD and the other police departments do about it? Jameson deserves an answer.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His forthcoming book is Trump’s Obama Obsession (Amazon eBook and Middle Passage Press – https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GH9RN5ZS
He hosts the weekly news and issues commentary radio show, The Hutchinson Report, Wednesdays at 6 PM PST 9 PM EST at ktymgospel.net
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