As if the act of murdering someone's dog wasn't infuriating enough the city has to go and say the officer did nothing wrong when they very clearly and objectively did. I can't imagine the rage the owners must be feeling right now.

“If your officers are that afraid of a little dog wandering around… maybe, just maybe, they shouldn’t be police officers.”

THIS. Dogs are a fact of life in a community. If you can't handle being around them without losing your shit and thinking your life is in danger, you shouldn't be a cop. Doesn't matter if you're great at all the other cop stuff, you don't have what it takes to safely enter other people's property.

If you get bitten by an animal you think has rabies (or an unknown mammal) go to a hospital lol. Police probably get treated for free.

"The news used to tell me what happened, and I decided how that made me feel. Now the news tells me how to feel, and I have to decide if I believe what happened." -Someone in a meme

Amen to that. It's the same as articles saying there is widespread outrage about something, but its actually just a few angry tweets that they could scrape together.

It's because journalistic integrity is dead. Whoever wrote this had a word quota, and just started reporting on Facebook comments until they reached it.

Love when half an article is "Comments on Reddit such as........" Do your fucking job journalists.

If the people that become US cops aren't already like that they break them to become like that during "training". I highly recommend looking up the shit they say and show during police training in the US, it's absolutely bonkers. They make them so scared of everything and fuck them up so badly that stuff like this is fully expected. So fucked up.

I'm not surprised. There's all kinds of fucked up backstories like this once you start digging. There are very unhinged people out there who get warnings, get put on admin leave, maybe transferred. Very difficult to fire if local govt and unions are involved. And you bet your ass they protect each other because that means selfishly protecting themselves and the entire department.

They don't even treat their own police dogs with respect. There's videos of cops yanking and choking them, body slamming them, etc. that that other stuff is just for show.

Also ACAB

I live in a decent size county, and our three animal control agents only works four hours a day six days a week and all calls go through 911. So if animal control aren't available, I could see 911 sending a cop...although he had an animal lasso, so maybe they do both jobs in that city.

Holy shit that just went from him being bad with the catch pole to shooting the dog with no provocation. He was following the dog around for a while being a little dog who didn't want to be caught. No growling, barking, or charging. Pretty sure that's completely incompatible with how rabid animals work. It was a silly dog just wandering around a field and wriggling out of a badly applied restraint. Then just switch over to blast the motherfucker.

Unreal that we succeeded at getting these maniacs to wear and use bodycams, the city watched the video, and they decided it was a good shoot. The was NOTHING to justify it, not even in a "people make bad decisions under stress" way.

You can see his shadow with the catch pole a few times. He's not even using two hands on it, which I believe means there was no way it could work. Hence why he couldn't restrain the dog despite being able to easily loop it over his head multiple times due to it being BLIND.

This was disturbing. If you're reading this and care enough remotely about animal life, don't watch this. Even though it's not the most graphic video I've ever seen, it was still disturbing to see how cold-blooded these people who are supposed to be our public servants are.

If you or I did what this officer did, we'd be facing charges.

Something that sticks out to me as someone who works in 911 dispatch (rest assured, I think my cops are bastards) is that I didn't even hear him key up to give his dispatcher a heads-up first (I don't want to give him the benefit of the doubt but it's possible he did and I missed it, I had my volume on pretty low)

Luckily we haven't had any cop shooting dog incidents in my county while I was working, and the small handful I've heard of that happened on other shifts have been justified cases where a dog actually attacked someone, but what we do get is a whole lot of injured deer or other critters that have been hit by a car and need to be put down, and our cops always key up beforehand to let us know before they do it, if only so we're prepared if 30 seconds later we get a call about shots fired in the area. Ignoring how inappropriate his actions were in shooting the dog, this was definitely a situation where there was no immediate danger and he could have taken an extra minute to radio his dispatcher to give them a heads-up and let them send a message to the calltakers "in case of shots fired calls in the area, officer dickbag is putting down a potentially rabid dog."

Of course this douchenozzle has no respect for life, he doesn't even have basic courtesy towards the people he works with or the people in the neighborhood who might be startled by hearing gunshots. People are understandably very relieved when they call in terrified that they just heard gunshots and we can confidently tell them "an officer just had to put down an injured deer a couple blocks away, so that's probably what you heard" and it saves us from having to enter a call for it that they then have to acknowledge.

Side-note, it's mind-blowing to me how many people just ignore what they think are gunshots. I work in a pretty diverse county that has a little bit of everything, but for the most part it's just various flavors of suburbia, not exactly the hood where shootings are an everyday thing or the sticks where every other neighbor is hunting or target shooting in their back yard, gunshots should trigger some alarm bells for most people. It's wild how many people will mention off-handedly that they thought they heard gunshots but didn't call for some reason, or they wait until way after the fact to call about it. Now I'm also pretty sure 90% of them are probably misidentifying what they heard (we get so many people calling in shots fired for fireworks, cars backfiring, doors slamming, etc. sometimes I can hear the fireworks in the background whistling, sizzling, and crackling in very un-gunshot ways while my caller swears up and down that they "know what gunshots sound like,") but even still, that's one of those cases where you should probably err on the side of caution. I'm personally very willing to ignore a lot of things, but if I think I hear gunshots somewhere I shouldn't be hearing them, I'm calling 911 immediately.

"Hello, police? Yes, this is Kristi Noem. Yes, I have a dog that got lost, so could you find it and shoot it for me? Normally, I'd just shoot it myself before it got lost, but I was running late this morning. Thanks."

People who call the police think the police are there to help. They don't expect the police will kill dogs or keep parents away from school shooters.

Well you don't become a cop by exhibiting a never-ending wealth of knowledge.

To be fair, dogs go nuts for bacon so the cops may actually have been in danger.

Well he can't sprinkle fentanyl, because being within 50 feet of a particle of fentanyl makes cops pass out.