Cops Cannot Do Without Killing

A nation that has been inundated with several cases of police brutality for so many years doesn’t really seem to be making positive strides for the better. It just seems like cops have a special knack for killing. Unarmed people are still getting killed by cops at an alarming rate.

It could be said that there’s some sort of indifference to police violence, thanks to the availability and accessibility of surveillance and camera footage. We see so many incidents concerning police violence so often, that it feels like the norm in our everyday lives. Our collective senses have been deadened. Could it be said that we don’t value human lives as much as we should?

Speaking about lives, what about the lives of dogs that are taken by cops every day? According to newspaper editors and police agencies, shooting a dog brings about more outrage from upset readers and public than an officer-involved shooting of a human.

Do you know that a dog is shot by a police officer every 98 minutes? That’s absolutely shocking, to say the least. A Puppycide Database Project gave a ballpark figure of about 182,000 dogs killed by police per year. Those are staggering numbers, coupled with the fact that some police departments don’t keep records for animal shootings, the numbers could be more.

However, shooting a police dog could bring you as much trouble as shooting a human being: for example, a 23-year-old Black man, Kelontre Barfield, was sentenced to 45 years in prison for killing a dog that belonged to the police. But cops kill dogs that are considered as family by their various owners and nothing is said or done about it.

There have been many cases, whereby cops kill dogs in the name of ‘officer safety’. Cops have little or no training in de-escalating situations concerning dogs and even humans, as they all result in the use of lethal force without thinking twice about the consequences of their actions. Therefore, it looks like they use animals for the so-called shooting training. We would love to believe that several police involved shootings are justified but the fact is they are not.

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Source: The free thought project