A Moveable Feast

“[Police] use terms like ‘apprehend’ and ‘restrain,’ to try to portray it as a very antiseptic event,” Cook says. “But you look at the video and the dog is chewing away on his leg and mutilating him.”

Cook says the proliferation of smart phones and body cameras is capturing a reality that used to be lost on juries. “If it’s a good video,” he says, “it makes a case much easier to prevail on.”

The new generation of videos is capturing scenes of K9 arrests that are bloodier and more violent than imagined by the public. An NPR examination of police videos shows some officers using biting dogs against people who show minimal threat to officers, and a degree of violence that would be unacceptable if inflicted directly by the officers.

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In fact, in many videos, the release of a dog appears to escalate the violence of an arrest.

“You just look at the dog as the source of pain and you do everything you can to address that pain,” says Seth Stoughton. He’s a former police officer, now an Assistant Professor of Law at the University of South Carolina who studies police use of force. “Those shouted commands — you’ll deal with that later, when the pain stops.”

And yet suspects who kick and try to shake the dog off are often accused of resisting arrest.

NPR (November 20, 2017)

I spent a summer training one of these balls of anxiety. She was too fast and strong for my aunt to train her, so I did it. The biggest hurdle was getting her out of the mindset that biting someone gets her a treat. I had to let her bite my arm, forcible break the hold, and kennel her all without giving her a response because these dogs are trained to equate someone screaming at them as Go Time. 

By letting her attack me and showing her that I was stronger than her and then not allowing her to play with the other dogs was what finally got her to stop attacking whenever she heard a loud noise or was surprised or just felt like it.