Oh God this guy’s in mid swing towards my head with a solid metal bar! Release the hounds! NOW NOW NOW!
Pardon my attempt to lighten the proceedings with a bit of levity.
Actually, I think it highlights the absurdity of your position. Either the officer (and unlike you, I don’t mean the dog) has to categorically decide that his canine is always more valuable than suspects or he has to make a judgment call in the moment about the merits of the specific suspect vs. his dog.
Your original post made clear what your position is: the handling officer should treat his dog above the suspect and refrain from taking action that puts the dog at risk in the same way that he would refrain from putting another officer at risk.
The dog does not equal a human. No officer should undertake the absurd task of weighing whether the dog is being put at risk by being employed against a suspect, if such employment would have a reasonable chance of effectively subduing the subject in a non-lethal manner.
In the present situation, I think its unreasonable to think that the dog alone would have been sufficient to protect the officers and bystanders. But, fear of harm to the dog should not outweigh the other factors. In other words, the dog is a tool. A valuable one that should be treated with respect, but it is nowhere in the park of being an officer or even a criminal suspect.
Um guys it’s nice that you think this, but I guarantee that in every police department in the United States, K9 safety is second only to officer safety, which is über alles.
This is why we have these threads. The two major factors warping our police forces in the modern day are militarization and the unbreakable mantra of officer safety. There is no split second judgment call. Officer safety always wins. That’s why citizens always die in these stories. That’s also why the police should never be called to defuse a violent situation peacefully, or to negotiate with a suicidal person if he has a weapon.
There are far worse examples than this story all the time. This one doesn’t even register.
A quick Google search didn’t find any thing supporting this, mind providing a site?
It did run into this case, Goodman v. Harris County, 571 F.3d 388 (5th Cir. Tex. 2009), in which the Fifth Circuit upheld a verdict that use of lethal force by an officer to protect a police dog against harm was excessive force.
So, if police forces are training there officers that they can use lethal force to protect their dogs, it might not work out so well for them.
I might have to take that back about the K-9s. This old LRC blog post (warning: intentionally written to effect an emotional response, don’t get too uptight about it) only shows low-degree felonies.
I’m not sure where else I could’ve heard it – perhaps just random news article comments from police spokespersons rather than a specific case. Maybe they’re uninformed, or speaking with bravado to try to protect their dogs and engender a feeling of respect for the police. Or perhaps the policy had to change due to new rulings.
Anyway, my rant on officer safety still applies (for whatever little it’s worth) but with that case you cited, it looks like K-9s aren’t necessarily #2 on the list of police priorities. That’s a relief! Carry on.
I can understand you trying to strawman me because you’re clearly on the wrong side of this discussion, but my points both stand and are morally obvious.
You can attempt to drum up some particular scenario where your previously unambiguous and comprehensive judgements might possibly be valid but that in no way demonstrates that they were correct statements. Again, you can walk it all back or modify it without prejudice, but if you’re going to continue down the path of dogs > humans you’re not going to have a good time of it.
So, considering that post you quoted was directly responding to your condesendingly worded question of if I thought a sliding scale existed where a dog’s life becomes more valuable than a humans, I’m pretty sure that means it’s more of a clarification on my position than a strawman, but thanks for the effort.
Also, I’m glad to know that I am in the presence of a living moral authority.
On the topic of strawmen:
I don’t know what to tell you if you think that this statement:
is equvalent to an “unambiguous and comprehensive judgement” that “dogs > humans”. Maybe if I had followed up my original statement with something like, “I also believe that police lives > all other human lives,” then I could see how you could leap to this position. But since I didn’t, then I’d like you to explan to me how this is not a flagrant use of a strawman.
But at least you have the moral high ground.
Look, I just wanted to point out to the people that sugested that the cop in the video should have loosed his dog on the guy about to smash him in the head with a metal pipe before resorting to shooting him, that the police don’t generally use their dogs in that fashion. That transitioned to me having to explain to you that I feel that there are some cases where a dog’s life could be more valuable than a human’s life, a belief I still stand by. You then made it a point to stick your fingers in your ears and spout bad internet debate speak. I feel like I’ve made my point and I’m done fucking around with you now. I guess that’s what I get for posting in P&R.
Oh and anyone who says:
without any sort of qualifiers to me seems extremely naive to me. So I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree on this point. Thanks for letting me know you disagree in such a needlessly inflammatory manner.
Pogo
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I think bmcel has a point. I’m not sure if his initial statement was meant to say flatly that the life of a dog is more important than the life of a human, because that statement is pretty meaningless without some context as to the nature of the dog or the human. I’m one of those assholes that feels that there are piece of shit humans out there who aren’t worth the life of a dog, though.
I think the point that I agree with is that a cop isn’t going to just use his dog as a meat shield. A dog is a tactical deployment for situations where a police officer does not have the physicality to do what a dog does, whether it’s sniffing for drugs or going on a dangerous chase through unknown territory.
Replace the crowbar in this situation with a gun-wielding maniac in which diplomacy is failing and you would see how reckless it would be to just send a dog in. Even though I very much dislike the protocol that encourages/requires police officers to empty whole clips into assailants, and that this situation was a bit reckless given the danger to the public, this asshole had to be taken down and it’s not worth the dog’s life for it.
I don’t know that anyone was so much talking about the crowbar guy by that point. I’m with Houngan - I like dogs, but any time you start calculating the worth of human lives in terms of dog lives you’re in very weird territory for me. Peter Singer would disapprove, but he’d also disapprove of what I had for dinner.
“But what if the human is bad and the dog is good” is just furiously digging a hole deeper. For me, and I daresay most people, “no, peoples lives are categorically different from a rights perspective” - hence our species’ frankly embarassing treatment of the millions of animals we mistreat and kill as a matter of routine and preference.
If you object to that - which is philosophically tenable - the first line of action is probably militant vegetarianism and defence of whales and great apes (currently getting killed off) rather than dogs (currently having it pretty awesome.)
I guess where I differ here is in instances where the “bad” human in question is in the process of disregarding human life. To me the question at that point becomes less about a rights perspective and more about a take immediate and appropriate action perspective. If a someone needs to be prevented from taking a human life then risking the dog in hopes of taking the guy alive doesn’t seem all that compelling unless there is a decently high chance that the dog can do it and remain relatively unscathed.
Of course that’s my opinion and a judgement call that might be difficult to make in the heat of the moment. I guess I just care less about someone’s right to life if they are demonstrably willing to deprive another of that right.
I too agreed that the dog was probably not the right solution for this situation, but unlike you and bmceldowney, I came to that conclusion from the perspective of likely effectiveness, not the safety of the dog.
Your own scenario of the gun wielder doesn’t clearly illustrate that it is the dog’s safety that makes the situation reckless, it also illustrates that the dog is the wrong tool for the task because of likely ineffectiveness. You don’t go after a gun wielder with a baton nor do you do so with a dog. Similarly, this lunatic with his crowbar was too immediate of a threat (to the bystanders, as well as the cop) to expect the dog to be an effective way of neutralizing him before he hurt someone.
Ultimately, bmceldowney statement that “K-9 units are absolutely considered police officers” and that their safety and training is on par with cops is plain silly. Tim James at least put them (temporarily?) on a rung below cops.
In the case under discussion I have no real issue with the dog not being used; in practice the time and situational constraints made a shooting pretty likely, and aside from the lack of success I understand that a K-9 policeman is not going to instinctively be sending his dog on “suicide missions” every time an argument could be made that a human life might be saved. People are human.
My objection was first to the idea that a bad bad person could in any reasonable sense be “worth less” than a good dog in any (satisfactory) philosophical perspective other than pretty radical animal rights equality one.
Beyond that:
It isn’t necessary to in any way waive or diminish the value of a bad person’s “rights” in a situation like that in order to choose to protect the rights of innocent parties. Opinion here, but I think it’s better to treat everybody as important humans with important rights - even if we have to hold our noses at what some people do, and even though some peoples’ rights have to be grossly abridged in the interests of justice.
The alternative - philosophically “demoting” bad people to an inferior kind of entity - strikes me as pernicious, too close to dehumanization.
That’s fair. To clarify, I am not suggesting that we have a “Dog Standard” that we judge humans by. I don’t feel like it is a decision to be made outside of a snap, live-or-die kind of scenario. Only in that context should a person’s value be judged against that of a dog.
Again, I am talking about the decision an officer has to make in the heat of the moment. Take the example of the fellow in the video. My perspective is that he gave up his right to life as soon as he made the indefensible choice to take a swing at a police officer with a deadly weapon. I’m not trying to turn this into a philosophical dog > human debate, that’s Houngan’s shtick. I’m trying to look at it from the more practical, snap decision level.
Emercency situations are precisely the wrong time to be making philosophical decisions of moral worth. Rather, that is the time when an officer should be falling back on ingrained training and clear department policy.
Honestly, everything you’re saying sounds really naive.
It may seem like a pettifogging detail and/or a subject you’re not interested in, but I’d maintain that right can’t be “given up.” Putting one’s self in the position where one’s inalienable right has to be infringed isn’t the same thing.
Also I’d say Houngan, like me, was partly responding to some more general things you said, which seemed, intentionally or not, to be broader than just the case of the crowbar shooting. “Humans who display a willingness and means to kill or maim other humans have far less value in my mind than a dog who’s purpose is to save other humans lives,” for example.
Here’s what did not happen: Some asshole robbed a Carl’s Jr, shot a kid in the face, and tried to kill a cop whilst making his getaway, so the cops had no choice but to shoot the asshole.
Here’s what did happen: A 22 year old man named Steven Rodriguez, a man with no criminal history, went into a Carl’s Jr and broke windows with a pipe. He hurt no one and robbed no one. Upon exiting the Carl’s Jr, we was approached by four cops, who, to their credit, first tried to tase him, then one of them for some reason put himself within swinging range of the pipe. Rodriguez made a threatening motion with the pipe, so one cop shot him in the gut five times. A second cop subsequently shot him five more times. In the back.
Perhaps given the circumstances—a deranged man who had many opportunities to hurt someone but had not done so—the police might have invoked protocols they are supposed to use when dealing with the mentally ill. “Approach aggressively, with guns drawn and shouting, and place oneself in range of blunt object held by individual” is not one of those protocols.
Again, I don’t this is clearly misconduct, but I don’t see any reason to express glee over this man’s death.
Hey, cunt. I was going to just let you backpedal around your little pond, but since you decided to mention me, here I am again. I know you’re trying to pretend like you have always had this wonderfully nuanced position, but the simple fact is that the entire idea of dogs being equal to humans was yours. For some reason you can’t just stop and say, “Hey, I didn’t really mean it like that, instead I meant it like this.” Instead you do internet 101 and try to act like you never said this:
That’s you, saying that when decided whether or not to kill someone a dog is just as valuable as a human. You’re wrong. You were wrong yesterday and you’re still wrong today. Just own up to it, say that you really meant that in some certain case Hannibal Lecter is a better choice for killing than Lassie, and move on.
I absolutely agree that training is vital. It’s purpose is to help an officer make the right call in a given situation. It cannot replace the officer’s judgement, only guide it. In a moment that a suspect has to be neutralized in one way or another, the call still must be made on how to do it. Risk still has to be evaluated according to the situation.
Oh, I see what you did there.
That’s fair. I should not have spoken about it in terms of a right to life. I guess a more accurate way to put my feelings on the matter is that I feel that the fellow in question shouldn’t have any reasonable expectation of not getting shot by the police after choosing to assault one with a deadly weapon.
I did make that statement more general because that’s how I generally feel. It was in response to people commenting that the dog should have been used in this scenario, but it is meant to apply to other, similar scenarios as well.
