Here’s a few-years-old story on the disturbing propensity of police to slaughter dogs to get them out of the way.

The Smoak family incident mentioned in the article is awful. Watch the video here (there’s a quick commercial before you get to the story). The dog is clearly wagging his tail, happy, and affectionate. The cop blows the poor thing away with a shotgun. Meanwhile, the dog’s family, wrongly handcuffed in front of their car, can only watch, and can’t do a damned thing about it.

UPDATE: The city apparently settled in 2004, but admitted no wrongdoing on the part of the officer.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 20th, 2006 at 10:46 am by Radley Balko and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.