TheAgitator.com
It’s All About the Badge
Sunday, March 8th, 2009So when the cops kill your dog, even when you’ve done nothing wrong, even if the pup was harmless, it’s “sorry–the officer felt threatened,” and there’s little you can do about it. It’s just an animal, after all.
During an elaborate memorial, Ringo the police dog received a final send-off Friday befitting canine aristocracy.
A motorcade of 30 police cruisers rolled slowly beneath a giant American flag stretched between fire department ladder trucks.
A floral arrangement spelling out the dog’s name was put across the windshield of the cruiser in which the Belgian Malinois traveled with his human partner, Anderson County Deputy Rick Coley.
Taps played softly outside the Clinton Community Center, where more than 100 people gathered to pay their respects.
Among the mourners: some 50 law enforcement officers – Clinton police, Anderson, Scott and Campbell County deputies, state troopers and Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency officers.
A multimedia slide show with pictures of Ringo in action, training and posing with his master or just cavorting, was flashed on the center’s Great Room wall.
Poster-sized photos of Ringo and awards he had won flanked the urn holding Ringo’s cremated remains.
More than one griever dabbed tears with tissues or fingers as Rio Diamond’s song “I Believe” played.
Ringo, described as fun-loving and hard-working, died Feb. 20 of kidney failure.
The highly trained police dog was 10 years old.
I’m as big a dog lover as you’ll find. But this is just embarrassing.
It’s not about dogs. It’s about the difference between cops and mere citizens. Cops are important. The center of the universe. They’re been told that by everyone they come in contact with (especially each other). They are like the Rockefellers and the Kennedys. The idea that they are like the teaming masses of little people they rule over never enters their consciousness.
In all honesty it is a touching tribute but I agree it is WAY over the top.
Hell, we don’t give many of our homeless VETERANS this much attention when they pass away. Sadly, a lot of HUMANS are buried in a pauper’s grave.
I love animals too…very much. My shih tzu is spoiled with a wardrobe of clothing, hairbows, leashes and collars that match, more toys than a lot of children have and eats filet minon. Yes, this is way over the top too, but no one else but me is footing the bill.
However, I think that a small graveside memorial would have sufficed in this case.
Not only is this over the top, it just seems a bit hypocritical to me.
Every Police funeral is a huge affair. It’s part of the Police Culture that celebrates their self perceived greatness and heroism.
Look at Police Web sites. They all have shrines to the fallen.
The more the police perceive themselves as embattled, as looked at by the common herd as corrupt… the more they ramp up the rhetoric of the Police Culture and the bigger the gap becomes.
So even cop dogs are more important and have more rights than me?
#2 Judi: “However, I think that a small graveside memorial would have sufficed in this case.”
Agreed. A K9 in my area died on duty not too long ago and the sheriff’s department did just that. Small ceremony outside the station, mostly involving the dog’s human partner, department brass and a few others. No procession, slide show, etc.. It was nice and respectful. K9′s provide numerous valuable services, such as tracking suspects, locating missing persons (children, dementia patients), assisting with building searches, explosives detection, etc.. They are NOT just used for narcotics detection (thankfully). So, the dogs are great, and their skills are amazing. But that ceremony was just silly.
#4 Bob:
Bob, I appreciate and share your concern about the police culture and its ruinous effects on the relationship between officers and private citizens. But I have to ask, would you say the same things about funerals for soldiers? How about fire-fighters (everybody loves fire-fighters, after all)? If so, I may disagree, but I would at least respect your consistency. If not, maybe you should just let the cops mourn in their own way.
The pomp and circumstance at police funerals is a tradition, largely based on the kinds of ceremonies held for officers in the early twentieth century, when most officers were Irish immigrants, and a lot of them were related. Thus, the events were quite a bit like family reunions. Today the ceremonies are larger, and are attended not just by police, but by their fire-fighting breathren, other criminal justice personnel, and many members of the public. The emphasis now is less on familial relationships and more on a bond among public safety employees that is indeed very tight, and an appreciaton for the decedent’s service. It’s not quite as conspiratorial as you think!
Full disclosure: I have attended three police funerals. I found them to be beautiful, solemn and very sad occasions for three officers who were just trying to do a job. One was shot, indeed executed, after a foot chase. Two others were killed in motor vehicle accidents, which are probably the most common cause of injury and death among police officers.
It is a fact that policing is not the most dangerous job around, in terms of injuries and deaths. Some positions in farming, construction, and factory work are result in more casualties. The main difference is that police (and fire-fighters) are more likely to die in very unusual and violent circumstances. Sadly, the drug war, and other issues, make policing more dangerous than it has to be, and drives a wedge between police and private citizens that doesn’t necessarily have to be there. So let’s focus more on eliminating or reducing these factors and less on faulting the cops for their customs.
Well, you people would have to understand Anderson County, TN. The city of Clinton especially. This is the city where they had a representative of MADD directing a DUI checkpoint a few years ago.
http://www.duiblog.com/2005/08/11/madd-roadblocks/
Also, for those who may recognize the name of Campbell County, this is the same place where deputies tortured a man in an attempt to get him to sign a consent-to-search form. I believe the victim’s name was Siler.
Helmut,
I don’t think it’s conspiratorial at all. People are not intentionally getting together and saying “We’re being pounded in the press! We gotta ramp up the pomp in funerals to enforce the party line!” There is no ‘Star Chamber” setting policy designed to create a Police State.
It’s creating itself through the propagation of viral memes like elaborate funerals.
The solution is transparency and accountability. They can have all the elaborate funerals they want so long as the mechanics to hold the Police Culture in check are in place.
Police need to get over themselves. It is not even in the top ten of dangerous occupations.
#9 Bob:
“The solution is transparency and accountability. They can have all the elaborate funerals they want so long as the mechanics to hold the Police Culture in check are in place”
Well said, sir. Thanks. I think we are pretty much on the same page here.
Helmut,
You said:
I don’t agree with you. Getting sucked into the PTO of a tractor is a very unusual and violent circumstance. Getting decapitated by a falling wire or tool is also violent. Death is death.
Personally, I believe that a funeral of this magnitude for a DOG, much as I love the dogs I own and have owned through the years, is UNFORGIVABLY over the top, especially in the midst of the worst economic crisis in roughly 75 years.
How much taxpayer money was wasted on this self-serving maudlin affair? I’m certain that there were paid public servants in attendance, whether to control traffic or other details, even if every attendee was on their own time, which I doubt. How much gas was wasted, and mileage put on publicly owned vehicles?
Could that money have been better spent on the widows and orphans of deceased officers, perhaps? I agree with those who say that this is just another instance of police culture reinforcing itself at the expense of the rest of the citizenry.
This just goes to show that cops often give greater value to the life of their dogs than to the people they protect.
#12 Tommy:
Fair enough. I was mostly referring to death at the hands of another, whether that is in a very direct manner (shooting, stabbing, bludgeoning, beating, etc.) or more indirect (arson, explosives, getting mowed down by a drunk driver, etc.).
The most unusual part of public safety work, however, is the sheer number of times per day that you might find yourself wrestling with a drunk, getting splattered with the blood of a hepatitis patient, chasing a car burglar, walking into a room filled with smoke or toxic vapors or dodging an out of control motorist. As a healthcare security officer, I sometimes step back and think to myself, “damn, that motherfucker could have had me if he was in that kind of mood!” I’m not negating the dangers faced by other workers or the sacrifices they make for their co-workers and families. I’m just saying that people in protective services come to the office and have to deal with a different set of concerns than most people. I’m ok with that, accept those risks, and I also admit that I wouldn’t want to have to deal with the stressors that people in other occupations have to endure.
Just seems odd that it seems to be a growing datum point in police culture that they are “supposed” to shoot civilian dogs whenever possible, but their canines are, by law and practice, commissioned officers.
The problem here is not the extravagence of police funerals. It’s not even the extravagence of the funeral for police dogs. No, the real problem is not how well cops treat themselves, but how often they treat us like crap.
Kill a family’s dog during a botched raid, and they don’t even have the common courtesy to apologize. When some 16-year-old black kid gets murdered on the south side of Chicago, the local cop blog fills up with snide comments and accusations of drug dealing. No sympathy for the family at all, ’cause they were probably drug dealers too.
If they want respect, we need to make them earn it.
Windy Pundit: “If they want respect, we need to make them earn it.”
Yup. That sums it up. They are OUR employees, so it’s only right.
Until it’s more evident that–paraphrasing Sir Robert Peel– the police are the people, and the people are the police, we will have to keep pressing this isse. And even at that point, we will still need to have a “trust but verify” relationship with even the most localized form of government. Shout out from Peoria, Windy!!! Well done.
In fairness to the police dog, he was a working dog. Although I don’t agree with the purposes to which he was put to work, there is a difference between a working dog that materially contributes its energy to society and a leisure dog that is merely someone’s companion or substitute child.
I think that if a legal distinction were made between these two classes of dogs, so that the owner of a working dog would be entitled to a specified amount of compensation, this might encourage the police to be more discriminating in which dogs they kill. They’d still get to kill pet dogs risk-free, but killing a registered and licensed working dog would stick the taxpayers with a hefty bill.
Then again, nothing would change, and the losses would just be socialized. And dogs would still be getting killed, albeit at a 100x or 1000x less frequent rate than in animal shelters.
The point you made of the difference between a cop gunning down a family pet and a dead police dog is striking. In Arizona, at least, one faces rather stiff felony charges for even interfering with a police dog in the performance of his duties. I shutter to think of the penalty for sprinkling pepper near your stash.
#5 In a word, yes.
The cops themselves state that there are cops, and there are non cops, and that’s how the world is divided. Police have made themselves nobility and knights, better than the rest of us. Peel’s Principles are pretty much dead here in the USA.
Recently in San Diego, a drunk driver tried to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge. An officer at the scene sent his dog after him, and as the dog grabbed his leg the guy jumped. Incredibly, the guy survived, but the dog died in the fall. There were a fair number of comments on the articles about the incident arguing that he should be charged with murder of a police officer!
I seem to recall the dog’s funeral was a pretty big deal.
(as a bonus, the initial police account had the guy picking up the dog and throwing it off. It wasn’t until video footage from a helicopter proved them wrong that they dropped that story)
Caligula’s horse.
Well, I guess some dogs do go to Hell.
“Bob, I appreciate and share your concern about the police culture and its ruinous effects on the relationship between officers and private citizens. But I have to ask, would you say the same things about funerals for soldiers?”
Here in Chicago, fallen police officers are given funerals fit for heads of state. Fallen soldiers are given nothing remotely approaching the attention given to fallen police officers. Virtually ever cop and every spare car is turned out for processions that close roads for miles. I was once an hour late for work waiting for a funeral procession to cross a main thoroughfare in the suburbs. It was a Chicago police officer, who was being buried outside the city.
The cost to the public is enormous and the cops’ attitude is that the world will stop in its tracks for us. Nothing of the sort is done for fallen soldiers. Cops rule the streets, so they turn the city upside down when one of their own dies.
Police shouldn’t even have their attack dogs. And that is what they are – attack dogs. They smack if Nazi Germany and Bull Connor.
Perhaps a pack of bloodhounds for tracking escaped prisoners and such or a Labrador to sniff for bombs or something but hauling around attack dogs to bite people and supposedly sniff out contraband isn’t compatible with a Republic of Free Men.