Bay Area Voice: There’s no place in police work for dogs trained to bite

There’s no place in police work for dogs trained to bite.

That’s probably not what you would expect to hear from someone with 30 years in law enforcement and a lifetime owning and handling the kinds of highly trained dogs used by police.

It’s not that I don’t love dogs or know what they can do. Quite the contrary.

There’s no mistaking someone bitten by a police dog, and I’ve seen it too many times over my career. Bones cracked and broken. Flesh and ligaments torn. Wounds that resemble a shark attack, sometimes from head to toe.

When a police canine is let loose, someone goes to the hospital. Police dogs in California seriously injure more people each year than are hurt by the batons and tasers wielded by all the other officers in the state combined.

Most of the people police dogs hurt are unarmed. They’ve been known to attack their handlers, fellow officers and innocent bystanders as well as criminal suspects. And their victims are disproportionately people of color.

When human officers use force, their actions are judged against policies that require using the least amount of force necessary to gain control of a situation. Not so with police dogs. Our state laws and regulations are silent when it comes to police canines — even though they often use far higher levels of force than humans.

According to California’s Attorney General, police dogs statewide account for more than one in 10 uses of force that result in serious injury each year. Nationally, more than 3,500 people a year are hurt by police dogs so badly that they need treatment in a hospital emergency room.

Well-trained dogs can be valuable tools for police searching for a lost child or detecting narcotics, but a growing coalition of civil rights and police reform advocates are calling for an end to the use of police dogs for apprehension and crowd control. Dogs may be man’s best friend, but their use in American law enforcement has its roots in the worst chapter in our history: slavery.

Before the Civil War, dog patrols hunted down and captured runaway slaves in southern states. And during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, police often used dogs to brutally disrupt peaceful protests.

Even today, racial bias in the deployment of police dogs remains. Studies show that people of color, particularly African American men, remain significantly more likely to be injured by police dogs than other citizens.

That’s why Assemblymember Dr. Corey Jackson, D-Perris, has introduced Assembly Bill 742 that would bar law enforcement agencies from using police dogs to control crowds or apprehend suspects. Sponsored by the American Civil Liberties Union and the California Hawaii State Conference of the NAACP, the bill is scheduled to be heard by the Assembly Appropriations Committee.

Opponents of the legislation contend that canines can sometimes protect human officers from danger.

But California’s most recent use-of-force statistics tell a different story. Statewide, only 20% of incidents that led to a severe injury by a police dog began as a crime in progress. And two out of three suspects severely injured by police dogs were unarmed. In the Bay Area, the number of police dog bites resulted in investigations of the use of police canines in Antioch and Richmond.

The simple fact is, we can do our jobs without dogs trained to bite. And make no mistake: Modern protection dogs are bred and trained to bite hard and to keep biting until recalled.

I have owned, trained and handled dogs like these long enough to know that even the best-trained dogs can make mistakes, especially in the chaotic, emotionally charged atmosphere that accompanies chasing a suspect.

That’s when a dog can go from being a useful tool to a deadly liability, because it can’t or won’t process and respond to a recall command.

I strongly support AB 742. Without it, people whose only crime is to be in the path of a police canine will continue to suffer permanent, life-threatening injuries — injuries disproportionately inflicted on people of color.

Our people (and our dogs) deserve better.

Sgt. Sean Allen is a member of the Santa Clara County Sheriff’s Department of Corrections. His commentary originally appeared in the San Jose Mercury News.