I...I...I'm not sure I even know how to respond to this one....

quote:

---

Police Dog Accused Of Racial Profiling
Councilwoman Wants Dog Put To Death
Posted: 10:06 a.m. EDT June 11, 2002

MCKEES ROCKS, Pa. -- A 5-year-old German shepherd named Dolpho is the lone police dog in McKees Rocks, just outside Pittsburgh.

Dolpho can tell the difference between marijuana, heroin and cocaine. But borough Councilwoman Wanda Jones Dixon said the dog targets blacks and should be put to death.

Dolpho made a mistake last week. While Officer Schawn Barger wrestled with a drug suspect, a door to the K-9 wagon was inadvertently opened.

The dog bolted out and bit 9-year-old Brandon Livingston on the leg. Livingston, who is black, was treated at a local hospital.

"This is something that will take him a while to get over," said the boy's mother, Lorraine. "The officer had no control over that animal. That dog should be put to sleep."

Police said the dog never targeted the wrong person before, but it became confused because there was a lot of noise and yelling.

The incident was brought up during a council meeting Monday. Dixon said she has received complaints from black people who said they were attacked by Dolpho, and they think race was a factor.

Dolpho is off active duty. An investigation is continuing, and no decision has been made about his fate.

---

I too find myself at a loss for words. Do you suppose it's even possible to TEACH a dog to recognize the difference between human races? I can't imagine how you'd go about it.

Oh come on, this is a joke isn't it?????
Or is it from one of those newpapers that have headlines like, "My Son Was Born With Antlers"

I could believe that a dog could distinguish dark skin from light skin, but I would never believe that a dog used skin colour to prejudice against people.

Samantha, unfortunately, from what I can tell, this one's for real.

The question I keep hearing from everyone I've mentioned it to is why there was a 9 year old boy at the scene of a drug bust.

Did it ever occur to anyone that maybe, just maybe, Dolpho did go after the right person? I mean there are people that use young children to hold their drugs. There is a good possibility, considering that Dolpho never targeted the wrong person before, that the 9 year old was holding the drugs on his person.

Did anyone, including the councilwoman, ever think of this?

Unfortunately using young children for drug smuggling happens all too frequently, but in this case I would assume the child to be innocent.

The police would certainly have thought of that possibility.

That's a distressing story. I'm trying to think how it might have occured. How does a dog know for example, if you are the neighbor that he or she knows, or if you are not? Ever noticed that if you're walking by a "good" dog who recognizes you, vs. the dog who doesn't realize you are the same old person and don't wish him any harm?

I've seen dogs who react to women as opposed to men. Or vice versa. There are normally reasons for this. Man mistreats dog, dog mistrusts men!
And so on and so forth.
This is why I am kind of wondering how the dog might possibly have made this conclusion.

If dogs can be trained to do certain precise tasks, hunt certain animals, like pick up a duck without damaging it and bring it to the master, well, couldn't they be trained to recognize a certain type of person?
I'm not saying that they were, but it's certainly in the realm of possibilities.

I am inclined to agree. The story looks ludicrous but...last summer I was standing in the middle of a big terrace in front of the Tesco here. A ways in front of me there was a little, nondescript dog tethered to a pole. About 5 or so meters away from the dog there was a family of Rom, about maybe 6 people - not doing anything in particular, just the kind of things families do before going into a supermarket. The dog became absolutely hysterical. It barked and lunged at them, and barked and lunged and barked. They eventually turned around and noticed it, and so did other people. The family looked really uncomfortable and kind of moved away. It was only when they were inside the doors that the dog stopped and settled down.

What was that all about?

[ June 12, 2002, 02:26 PM: Message edited by: Dobrov ]

Animals generally have excellent instincts, and dogs do have long memories. Sometimes they make the mistake of picking up the wrong information.

For example, when we smile at them they see it as barring our teeth at them and when children are running around shrieking excitedly they sometimes see it as aggressive behaviour and retaliate by barking.

Another example is dogs barking at postmen. They don't know it's a postman by recognising a uniform as such. It's just animal psychology, the postman turns up most mornings and rattles the letterbox, but no matter how many times he comes to your door you won't let him in.

Everyone else who arrives at the door at least gets it opened to them even if they don't come over the threshold, but not the postman, therefore he obviously isn't welcome and the dogs lets him know that.

The story you relate would seem to bear this out. I would imagine that the dog had remembered something in its past which triggered this situation.

Dogs that are raised by white people will usually be aggressive to Orientals and African Americans, and other races of darker skin.

Dogs that are raised with African Americans will usually be aggressive to white people and Orientals.

Dogs that are raised with Orientals will usually be aggressive to white people and African Americans.

This is not considered 'racial profiling', it is just what the dog is used to.

Dakota has the right idea.

Dogs are pack animals, and they quickly make decisions as to who is and who isn't a member of the pack. This is ingrained fairly early in puppyhood- a dog who isn't exposed to many situations as a puppy may well be fearful of those same situations later on. This includes everything from riding in the car to trips to the vet to people with hats and umbrellas- as well as people of different races.

In addition, dogs pick up on very subtle clues of body language, and can probably sense emotions by smell as well. Thus, if a person is uneasy around people of a certain race, his dog will pick up on that unease and may well transfer it to people of that race.

As for this specific case, exactly what happened is impossible to tell without more information. Where was the child when Dolpho jumped from the car? What did the child do when he saw the dog? What is the track record of the police officer? And so on.

[ June 12, 2002, 07:03 PM: Message edited by: crisw ]

It doesn't mention where the drug bust happened. It could have been on a street corner - we don't know. But if it was in a public place, then the little boy would have been an innocent bystander, wrong place at the wrong time, but not deliberately jeopardized.

I agree that the police would have investigated the possibility that the child was carrying drugs. They wouldn't want to take the rap for an unprovoked dog attack.

I don't know anything about racial profiling by dogs, but I do know that I certainly don't want that dog serving with the police force. A police dog became so "confused because there was a lot of noise and yelling" that it couldn't be controlled? WHAT? Excuse me, but what sort of police dog isn't capable of dealing with noise and yelling? I think that's a pretty common occurrence in an arrest, raid, bust, or anything the dog would conceivably be used for other than Officer-Friendly-type stuff. This pooch does not have what it takes; nor, probably, does its trainer. Both should have no place as a K-9 unit.

I think you all said what I was getting at, that there must be some fire with all that smoke.
1. I don't think we have all the story anyway.
CD brings up the obvious, if the dog attacked a child that was not involved in the drugs bust, he didn't have it on him or anything, then he should no longer perform that task. Doesn't matter what race the person was.

I am afraid that racial "profiling" could very easily be done with a dog.
I had seen evidence of this in the South but didn't want to bring it up until the animal experts did here.
They'll take the natural pack instincts of the animal that you mention, then pervert them to attack or check out people who are racially different.

If most of the drug busts were performed in African American communities, then it's like the postman thing for the dog, isn't it?

I'm not saying that this is what happened in the situation, but I am saying that it could be done.
Also, like CD, I don't think the dog should be used anymore for that job, if he can no longer distinguish between people "making a fuss" and people who need to be stopped and sniffed for drugs.

I didn't really even think about the dog being put to sleep Linda, simply taken off the job and put out to pasture.
As if the dog were a human police officer involved in wrongly using his service weapon and despite the guilt or non guilt, the officer should be relieved of the specific duty until it's cleared up.

I was thinking more of the margin for error for the dog to do the same thing twice.

My grandmother was attacked by a neighbor's dog who was on his third such attack. The dog outweighed her! As the dog should have realized that she was not a threat, if she rang the doorbell to give the lady a package, she'd even met the dog, and had done this three times, well the owner chose to finally have it put to sleep rather than have this occur again.

If the police dog does this in this context, then he should be taken out of it.
It's different than a private home.
But having him put asleep, I'm not sure.

I still feel we have not got all the details on this case, it doesn't seem to illustrate "racial profiling" at all.
The lady in San Francisco then again, now she belonged to a white supremists group and kept their dogs when they were imprisoned, now there I'd be inclined to believe the dogs were trained expressly to react towards different races.

It seems to me that everyone is missing the point. The point is that Dolpho never targeted the wrong person before. There had to be a reason, besides so-called racial profiling, for Dolpho to attack the 9 year old boy.

Since dogs are incapable of lying, unlike people, maybe the kid antagonized Dolpho and harrassed him to the point where Dolpho defended himself. After all, he may be a policedog, but he is a dog first and foremost.

Think about, if that kid did something to Dolpho, who was probably going to his partner's aide, and Dolpho attacked the kid, wouldn't the kid have a legit reason to lie?

Also, like Crisw and I pointed out, dogs are incapable of 'racial profiling', so 'racism' isn't the case here'.

And do we kill or destroy an officer who shoots the wrong person? No we don't. So just because Dolpho attacked the wrong person [although who's to say the kid was the wrong person] he shouldn't be destroyed, he should be retired from the force.

As my dog's trainer told the class, 'there are no such things as bad dogs, only bad owners'. Any dog handler or trainer will tell you this.

Also this poem says it all:

A heart to love you till you die,
that's a thing that money can buy,
A look of love from a loving eye,
that's a thing that money can buy.
A tongue that will never tell a lie,
that's a thing that money can buy.
Ears and tongues, and hearts and eyes
these are the things that money can buy.
Wherever dogs are offered for sale,
these are the things that money can buy

Dogs have feelings and can think, but cannot think into the future. If a dog attacked you, unprovoked, it was either mistreated by its owner or by other people, or was trained to attack.

There are a lot of reasons why dogs will attack:

1. They were taught to attack
2. They were provoked
3. They were defending themselves
4. They were defending their owners
5. They were defending their young
6. They were defending their territory
7. They were mistreated
8. They grow old and become senile [this can cause a dog to bite a person, when they've never bitten before]
9. They were injured in some way
10. They are in pain

If a person teaches them to attack or mistreats or provokes a dog, the dog will attack. There's no question about it. This can happen to the most well behaved dog.

Senario: If my female Collie, who was physically, mentally, and though I hate to say it here, was sexually abused, had her throat cut, had her back legs broken, and her tail broken by her first owner, attacked someone, would it be her fault? Would she be in the wrong for what she did?

I would say she had every right to do it, considering what happened to her.

The fact of the matter is that people lie, whereas dogs do not lie. Since Dolpho and his partner were the only two policemen on the scene, and since the human policman was in the middle of arresting someone, he can't say he saw what happened as to why Dolpho attacked the kid. We only have the kid's, and others around the kid, say so.

Here's another point: when my dog, Dakota, was about two years old, I had him outside at night in the summer, because it was very hot out. There was this 4-6 year old girl who kept running over to him and hitting him. I told her mother and grandmother, who live right next door to me, to please keep the girl away from the dog because it's hot out. The girl didn't listen and came over and deliberately stomped on my dog's back foot. He jumped up and jumped on her, giving her a red mark on her face and on her chest. Dakota didn't bite her, he just scared her.

I take it that my dog was trained to hate little girls? I don't think so.

Here's another point: Dolpho was inside the patrol car when the bust was going down, right? The human police officer couldn't have been paying attention to the patrol car, right? Who is to say that the kid wasn't near the police car, banging on the door or window, and basically antagonizing Dolpho?

Also, the councilwoman claims she's received numerous complaints from blacks who say that Dolpho attacked them. Funny, how come the thought of Dolpho making 'racial' profiles was never mentioned in the paper until now? I'm sure if those complaints are legit, the councilwoman would have demanded Dolpho's death long ago.

I stand by what I said. Considering that Dolpho never targeted the wrong person, who is to say that he targeted the wrong person this time? People lie, dogs don't and can't.

Oh, and of course the councilwoman believes the 'innocent angels' that were on the corner when the bust went down. Why were they on the corner? Why was that kid on the corner at the same time that a drug bust went down?

Also, who inadvertantly opened the patrol car door? Dolpho didn't, his partner didn't, so who did? Hmmmm....kind of makes you wonder who did, doesn't it?

There can only be one reason why the kid and everyone else was on the corner when the drug bust went down...... but I'll leave that to your own thoughts.

[ June 13, 2002, 09:17 PM: Message edited by: DakotaNorth ]

Dakota - you can't blame people for standing on a street corner at the same time as a police action! It's a public place, and it isn't like the police announce on bullhorns that they're going to raid in five minutes, will all innocent parties please leave the area. In some neighborhoods it's impossible to avoid passing by drug deals of some kind. There are all kinds of innocent and ordinary reasons why an innocent and ordinary person might be caught in the area when a police action occurs.

I don't dispute that you were told that by dog trainers and handlers, Dakota, but I wish you would recognize that people who make money in this profession have a vested interest in promoting certain points of view. I'm not faulting them, but it's in the nature of business - of COURSE they're going to tell you that training makes a dog, since they're the ones doing the training. They're not going to tell you that different dogs can have very different personalities (they do) and that, therefore, some dogs are more trainable than others (they are). And I'm sorry, no matter what drove them to it, dogs who maul people are bad dogs. I understand that your dog Dakota was provoked, and I think that scaring the child probably taught her and her relatives a lesson that may save their lives later, but if your dog had bitten the child's face off then yes, it would have been the dog's fault.

Cris - The three possibilities you list seem reasonable to me. I'd like to say, though, that I believe poor training/handling of the dog may be more likely than you think - it does say that the dog is "the lone police dog in McKees Rocks". A police department with little experience in such matters would be more inclined to make dumb mistakes, I should think.

I'd like to bring up another point ... it seems as though many of the respondents here may not have had much experience with profiling of black people by the police, but understanding how prevalent and horrific it is may help in understanding the councilwoman's point of view (even if you still disagree with her). Police in Prince George's County, Maryland - no more than a couple hours' drive from this town in Pennsylvania - have deliberately set their dogs on black people who had already been arrested and restrained, and who were offering no resistance. (One K-9 officer was convicted of this just last year - this is a CURRENT problem.) Police are far more likely to shoot at black men than at white men, regardless of whether either is an actual suspect - and I think you've all heard of the horrific cases with the NYPD in the 1990s, where they shot several unarmed black men who were under no criminal suspicion (one of them had simply refused to buy marijuana from a cop posing as a dealer), and tortured horrifically a noncriminal black man named Abner Louima. At least in the DC Metro area, it is common for black drivers to be pulled over for random checks, and then to sit there in their cars while officers look for reasons to book them. (This has happened to many of my friends) - white people who are randomly pulled over are sent off after nothing wrong is noticed immediately. The mayor of one Pennsylvania town (was it York) was recently arrested for having participated in the race-based killing of a young, innocent black woman in the 1960s.

With all this background, can one blame the black community for being so sensitive to this kind of issue? After all, if you don't speak loudly, your complaint will never be heard. At least this is prompting discussion and possibly action, instead of being buried in a police log.

Just wanted to add one thing:

quote:

---

Senario: If my female Collie, who was physically, mentally, and though I hate to say it here, was sexually abused, had her throat cut, had her back legs broken, and her tail broken by her first owner, attacked someone, would it be her fault? Would she be in the wrong for what she did?

I would say she had every right to do it, considering what happened to her.

---

It's terrible that this happened to your dog, DN, and her first owner was certainly something not appropriate for me to say on this website. If your collie attacked her first owner, that would be justifiable. But it seems to me that you're arguing that she has the "right" to attack anyone she sees, regardless of who they are or what they're doing or whether they'd ever done anything to her, just because she's had a difficult past. Sorry, but that's absurd. If your dog behaved in such a manner, she would have no place in human society, period. I'm glad that she's better-adjusted than that, but I'm confused why this collie is being assigned more "rights" to express her angst than any human. Does a horrifically abused person have the right to shoot the first person - man, woman, old,young - he or she sees?

Cd, from what the story says, Dolpho didn't maul the boy, he bit him. Mauling and biting are two entirely different things.

Mauling is what lions do to people, and what the dog in California did to that woman in the hallway, before she died. Mauling is biting over and over and over again, in different parts of the body.

A bite is just that, a bite. Dogs can just bite, but that doesn't mean it was a mauling.

The child was bitten once, and no more than once, on the leg. If the dog really wanted to do some damage, he could have went for the throat or face, but he didn't, did he?

Also, I'm sorry to disagree, if a person provokes or antagonizes a dog, and the dog bites them, it is not the dog's fault, it is the person's fault.

Just because dogs have four legs and can't speak a language that is vocally understandable to people, doesn't mean that they have no rights, and it doesn't mean that a dog is stupid or a bad dog.

If you think that every person in the whole world tells the truth, you're sadly mistaken. I've seen children 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, etc lie about what a dog did to them, just so the child wouldn't get in trouble for misbehaving, the children didn't care what would happen to the dog. I've even seen adults lie about a dog, claiming that for no reason what so ever, the dog attacked them, when this was clearly not the case.

I've even seen a teenager call the police and actually tell the police that a Rottweiler attacked him. The police were after that dog and his owner. She had to hide her dog in a neighbor's house so the dog wouldn't be shot or taken to the SPCA. Funny thing about this story is that the next day that same teenager walked by without a shirt, and guess what? He didn't have any bite marks, stitches or anything the matter with him.

So you can't say that all people tell the truth, and that dogs lie.

Dogs can't lie....

I never said that Dolpho mauled the boy, and I understand the difference. What I said was that dogs who do maul people are bad dogs, no matter what you were told by dog trainers. My argument was that bad dogs exist.

I never argued that people don't lie. That would be a ridiculous statement. But there were lots of witnesses to this, including the police officer, who apparently did not have a satisfactory explanation for this event. With his dog and his job at stake, wouldn't he say that the boy had provoked the dog if he believed that that was what had happened? What I don't understand is why dogs' inability to speak is an argument of any kind. Is your argument that, by biting the boy, the dog testified that the boy had done something wrong? Dogs can't lie, true, but they can't tell the truth either. I fail to see why this fact matters at all. I'm really unclear what you're trying to say here, though I've read this part of your post many times. Perhaps you could read mine more closely too.

I never said that dogs have no rights. I said that they don't have the right to randomly attack people, which is what I read your post as saying. You did not address this point.

I never said that dogs were "stupid" or "bad" just because they weren't people and couldn't speak. I have no idea where you got this statement from.

quote:

---

So you can't say that all people tell the truth, and that dogs lie.

---

You're right, I can't. So it's a good thing that I didn't say that in the first place.