Cops increasingly hesitant to shoot, but shoot more pit bulls anyway
Merritt Clifton posted: " Police are injured almost a third of the time & civilians injured nearly half the time before cops shoot a dog THIBODAUX, Louisiana––Perhaps the most controversial police shooting of a dog in all of 2023 came on Christmas morning in Thibodaux, Lo" Animals 24-7
Police are injured almost a third of the time & civilians injured nearly half the time before cops shoot a dog
THIBODAUX, Louisiana––Perhaps the most controversial police shooting of a dog in all of 2023 came on Christmas morning in Thibodaux, Louisiana, where a passing driver videotaped a police officer in the act of first chasing and then shooting a free-roaming pit bull, after the pit bull eluded both the owner and the police officer.
What the videotape did not show is that several other police officers were also trying to catch the pit bull, who according to the Thibodaux Police Department had already bitten the police officer who did the shooting.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Muckrake missed the scoop
Cassie Schirm, investigative reporter for New Orleans television station WDSU, quoted witnesses who alleged that "the dog was not aggressive at all, but did seem scared and skittish," and "was wagging his tail."
Schirm failed to note, however, that the overwhelming majority of the hundreds of pit bull attacks captured on video show the pit bulls wagging their tails as they kill and maim humans and other animals, and that many of those pit bulls might be described as "scared and skittish," which in no way diminishes the risk they pose to others.
(Beth Clifton collage from police bodycam)
Cops shot as many dogs in 2023 as in 2021 & 2022 combined
Regardless of whatever eventually results from the Thibodaux shooting, data on reported police shootings of dogs logged by ANIMALS 24-7 since January 1, 2005 indicates that law enforcement agencies in the U.S. shot as many dogs in 2023, 90 in cases reported by mass media, as in 2021 and 2022 combined.
This was still fewer than in any year before 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic forced a drastic reduction in public activity, including in dog-walking and other outdoor activities in which dogs had the opportunity to run amok among strangers.
Of the dogs shot by police in 2023, 53 were officially identified as pit bulls. Another 31 dogs were not officially identified by breed, but 24 of them appear to have been pit bulls.
Altogether, pit bulls appear to have accounted for 85% of the dogs shot by police in 2023, with no other breed type identified in more than one case.
Police officer shooting pit bull who attacked him in Nampa, Idaho, in 2012.
84% of dogs shot since 2005 were pit bulls
This is consistent with the cumulative data from all eighteen years that ANIMALS 24-7 has logged police shootings of dogs.
Of the 1,267 dogs shot by police in logged cases, 1,060, or 84%, were pit bulls. Pit bulls were 87% of the dogs shot by police in 2018-2023.
Humans were injured by the dogs who were shot in 75% of the shootings in 2023. Police officers were injured by 30% of the dogs who were shot; civilians in 49%.
These numbers are markedly up over the years.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Both police & civilian injury rates soar
Police in 2005-2006 were injured by a dog before opening fire on the dog in only one case in 12; civilians were injured before a dog was shot in one case in nine.
Amid rising controversy over police shooting dogs, the police injury rate rose to one case in six by 2017, while the civilian injury rate reached one case in three.
Over the five years 2018-2022, police were injured first by the dogs they shot in 28% of the cases; civilians were injured first in 47%.
What the cumulative numbers clearly show is that police have become increasingly reluctant to shoot dogs until the dogs have already inflicted injuries on humans.
But this does not mean that fewer dogs are being shot, only that the dogs who are shot are being allowed considerably more opportunity to wreak havoc before taking a bullet.
ANIMALS 24-7 is aware that police shootings of dogs tend to be reported by mass media, and therefore come to our attention to be logged, chiefly in cases in which humans are killed or severely injured, or that become controversial for some other reason.
ANIMALS 24-7 noted in 2017 that data from New York City, Los Angeles, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where court cases have repeatedly resulted from police shooting dogs, showed that among these cities, with a combined human population of 13.1 million, the highest total number of shootings in any given year since 2000 was 115.
If police throughout the U.S. shot dogs at the same cumulative rate, the annual toll would have been about 2,800, of which ANIMALS 24-7 would receive documentation of about 5%-10% in any given year.
(Beth Clifton collage)
Cops kill more dogs than before 2017, but dogs kill nearly twice as many humans
Updating the Milwaukee data and adding more recent data on police shooting dogs from Chicago, Detroit, Grand Rapids, and Rochester, New York to the older New York City and Los Angeles data yields a sample base on nearly 17 million people, equal to approximately 5% of the total U.S. population.
These six cities together average 171 dogs shot by police per year, which projects to 3,432 total dogs shot by police for the U.S. as a whole.
This indicates a 22.5% overall increase in dogs being shot by police since 2017, despite the low numbers during the COVID-19 years.
That in turn coincides with an increase in U.S. pit bull attacks killing humans from an average of 24 per year from 2005 through 2016 to an average of 46 per year from 2017 through 2023.
(Beth Clifton collage)
But police kill far fewer dogs than pit bull advocates claim
The accelerating toll of both police and civilian injuries before police shoot rampaging dogs coincides with an explosion of activism against dog shootings by police, including an oft-amplified allegation usually misattributed to the U.S. Department of Justice that police shoot as many as 10,000 dogs per year.
This claim appears to trace back to a guesstimate that police may shoot as many as 25 dogs a day, included in both a 2010 publication by the American SPCA and a 2011 paper funded by the pro-pit bull National Canine Research Council, a wholly owned subsidiary of the pit bull advocacy front Animal Farm Foundation.
Beth, Merritt, & Teddy Clifton.
The 2011 paper, "The Problem of Dog-Related Incidents and Encounters," was issued as a police training guide by the Office of Community Oriented Policing, within the U.S. Department of Justice, but the U.S. Department of Justice itself does not appear to have had any part in producing the 10,000-dogs-per-year-shot claim––or in verifying the dubious math behind it: 25 dogs shot per day multiplied by 365 days in a year would be "only" 9,125 dogs, still nearly three times more than can be projected from reported data.
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