Nearly every week there are media reports of police officers shooting dogs while responding to calls, and some of these incidents go viral once captured by a mobile device or an officer’s dashboard camera. These events are polarizing for communities, pitting officers who protect and serve the public and may fear for their own safety against residents who love their dogs and are traumatized by losing a family pet.
Now, thankfully, there is a new resource available to bring communities together and to improve the safety of both dogs and law enforcement personnel.
At a news conference this afternoon at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., representatives of the National Canine Research Council, Safe Humane Chicago, the Chicago Police Department and the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Community Oriented Policing Services announced the launch of a new video training series for law enforcement agencies across the country.
Called “Police & Dog Encounters: Tactical Strategies and Effective Tools to Keep Our Communities Safe and Humane,” this resource gives police the necessary tools to keep them protected when they encounter a dog while on duty.
Stacey Coleman, executive director of the National Canine Research Council, which funded the project, said, “Police are the cornerstone of every community across the country, and these brave men and women keep us safe. They are trained and prepared for dangerous and unfamiliar situations. But part of their training was incomplete—until now.”
The videos, which are broken into five 10-minute segments, are available online. They feature Chicago police officers in situations they routinely encounter on duty and dog behavior expert Brian Kilcommons demonstrating real-life scenarios with SWAT and street officers. The goal is to introduce options and strategies police officers can use to better understand and deescalate encounters with dogs to keep themselves and communities safe.
Police officers can’t be expected to be dog behaviorists, but giving them a set of tools to more accurately read and assess a dog’s body language—knowing, for example, when a dog is frightened, not aggressive—will help them do their jobs better. This is a great example of a public-private partnership to develop a constructive solution to a problem that has divided communities all across the country. We are grateful to the Justice Department and other agencies and organizations working to lift up the entire field of community policing and animal welfare, and The HSUS and HSLF are working to spread these ideas to the nation’s law enforcement community.
