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> this time about the preoccupation of white Americans with their pets rather than the death of black Americans at the hands of police.

Is it possible to read any article without being psy-op'd?

How is this a psy-op? Seems like an sociological observation to me.
One that appears deliberately placed and really has nothing to do with the article subject, except to stir unrelated emotions.
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It can't be an epidemic, the CDC is banned from thinking about gun deaths.
I think you're mistaken. First off, I don't think you can legally ban an organization from "thinking" about something (although I'm not sure what it means for an agency to think about something... Is that metonymnic for the thoughts of the people who are employed there?).

On top of studying and tracking gun violence statistics, the CDC also spends around $30m/year on research and grants to reduce gun deaths

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/27/us/politics/gun-violence-...

> Federal money for gun research all but disappeared after Congress in 1996 enacted the so-called Dickey Amendment, which barred the C.D.C. from spending money to “advocate or promote gun control.” It was named for Jay Dickey, a former Republican House member from Arkansas, who proudly proclaimed himself the National Rifle Association’s “point man” in Washington.

> [...]

> In 2019, Dr. Rosenberg and Mr. Dickey’s former wife, Betty, a retired former prosecutor and chief justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court, helped persuade Congress to restore the funding; lawmakers appropriated $25 million, split between the C.D.C. and the National Institutes of Health, for firearm injury prevention research.

Congress stymied funding for 25 years, but it has since been restored.

"Although the Dickey Amendment did not explicitly ban it, for about two decades the CDC avoided all research on gun violence for fear it would be financially penalized. Congress clarified the law in 2018 to allow for such research, and the FY2020 federal omnibus spending bill earmarked the first funding for it since 1996."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dickey_Amendment

That is either misleading or outright false. You are referring to the Dickey Amendment, which which mandated that "none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) may be used to advocate or promote gun control."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dickey_Amendment

I used to be a reserve deputy sheriff. One night we got a call about two "vicious Rottweilers" who had broken through their fence into the neighbor's yard and were mauling the pet bunny.

It turned out that the dogs were two happy playful boxer puppies who didn't physically harm the rabbit in the slightest, and the fence was so rotten that a stiff breeze could have knocked it down.

What stuck with me, though, was that a couple of the cops who showed up to the scene were disappointed that they wouldn't get to shoot a dog after all.

That tells you all you need to know about who we select for in law enforcement roles. Society needs peacekeepers and people who know how to and prefer de-escalation, not warriors.

https://www.vox.com/2020/7/31/21334190/what-police-do-defund... (Vox: We train police to be warriors — and then send them out to be social workers)

Not really warriors. Bullies.
I don’t think this is accurate. However, almost every person I knew in school that I would have described as a bully I knew growing up became a cop for some part of their life.

So, I’d say from my perspective and experience, it’s likely a job that is probably attractive to bullies, as opposed a job that is creating them.

I hear you, but do you want the job? I always hear that “society should select this and that” for police and military jobs, but the people saying these things that society should do would almost never volunteer. So it feels like a hollow solution.

That said, the training could be much better than it is. But people like low taxes.

Many people that are protectors do join the force. But they're bullied off and intimidated by the bullies on the force who have far more seniority and the backing of the police union. Trying to speak out about the wrong doings of other police officers on the force has cost many good officers their career while the police who commit murder get a paid vacation and their job back. At worst they have to find a job at a new department which is never difficult for them. So yes, there are tons of people who would love to have such a job if proper oversight became a thing as well as the removal of many problematic officers.
Cops are often the highest paid employees on a government's payroll. Hell, I've lived in states where the cops' median salary of $105,000 a year[1] was higher than the median salary for software engineers, which was about $90,000 a year. That's before overtime, too. Not only that, but they get great benefits and the ability to retire with a full pension after only 20 years of working.

People line up for these types of jobs. It's just that a certain type of person is hired to fill them.

[1] https://www.nj.com/news/2017/05/how_much_is_the_median_cop_s...

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Two things

1. Asking engineers if they want the job doesn’t seem like a gotcha. Of course not they’re engineers

2. I wouldn’t mind the job, really, but I don’t want to work with the type of people who currently are on most police forces.

You need to filter out the warriors and hold them accountable for their actions...
In my observations of law enforcement, it seems only a small portion are interested in being proper police. The vast majority uses it as a way to gold power, and over a career, that power erodes the human side.
I’m pretty sure they have the job for the salary.
Why not both?

Some people become police after failing to qualify for the military. Salary can't be their only motivation.

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The facts presented are that, despite a frantic call about viscious dogs, the responding officers were able to assess that the threat level was low, and avoid shooting the dogs.

But you seem to be holding them accountable not for their actions, but their words later.

There is entirely too much focus on peoples thoughts rather than their track record of actions.

If we take this heresay as gospel we have a situation where an on duty officer would have shot the dog, had they thought they could get away with doing so. Additionally they admitted as much in conversation, and I consider speaking about wanting to discharge your weapon during a call to be an action worth note.

Let's raise the stakes for another example. If a cop does a debrief after a routine traffic stop and says, "I was waiting for a reason to shoot this man where he stands", that's a matter of concern. It doesn't matter that the cop did the correct thing this time, because they're showing that the desire to kill someone is the driving force in their actions.

It doesn't just require taking the story as gospel, you'd also have to take the officers' words as deterministic of their actions (which is dubious at best), and you'd also have to interpret them in the worst possible way.

For instance, you can interpret disappointment in at least two ways:

(A) Disappointment that they were unable to apply lethal force regardless of the situation; or

(B) Disappointment that the situation did not call for lethal force, but had no desire to apply lethal force where it was not required.

You chose (A), but there's really no evidence presented for that interpretation over (B).

This is just another reason we should judge actions rather than words. Actions are much more objective.

Why is B much better here? It enables the officer to claim they felt threatened when no valid threat existed and then exercise lethal force in self defense (whether or not the threat was valid).

I can't think of any reason why someone should be justifiably disappointed they couldn't apply lethal force.

Intent is everything. Does that disappointment of not being able to justify shooting dogs extend to disappointment over not shooting a human being for other people working as police?
I simply disagree. "Intent" without any positive step toward realizing that intent, much less carry it out to completion, means little in comparison to a real action.

I don't claim that words mean nothing, but we seem to be weighting them much too highly. Especially when we have actual actions to compare it to.

Seems to me we are weighting the reaction to the reaction to them too highly.
Intent informs the end result ultimately.
Or maybe instead of promoting a class of people to have magical powers of coercion who are jointly above the law we could rely on personal and social accountability. The continued erosion of individual accountability through bureaucracy and institutions has done little more than destroy communities and complicate regular function through a litany of Catch-22 scenarios and provide an illusory backdrop of "security" while promulgating an ideology firmly founded in the broken window fallacy and leveraging policing authority to generate revenue. It should be noted that historically, police did not function as they do now. Beginning in the 1830's and finally reaching saturation in 1880. It was a system meant to subjugate the bottom class that originated in slave recapture. It's not intended for peacekeeping, it's not preserved in our interests.

Gary Potter, "The History of Policing in the US"[1]:

"In the Southern states the development of American policing followed a different path. The genesis of the modern police organization in the South is the “Slave Patrol” (Platt 1982). The first formal slave patrol was created in the Carolina colonies in 1704 (Reichel 1992)."

"More than crime, modern police forces in the United States emerged as a response to “disorder.” What constitutes social and public order depends largely on who is defining those terms, and in the cities of 19th century America they were defined by the mercantile interests, who through taxes and political influence supported the development of bureaucratic policing institutions. More than crime, modern police forces in the United States emerged as a response to “disorder.” These economic interests had a greater interest in social control than crime control. Private and for profit policing was too disorganized and too crime-specific in form to fulfill these needs. The emerging commercial elites needed a mechanism to insure a stable and orderly work force, a stable and orderly environment for the conduct of business, and the maintenance of what they referred to as the “collective good” (Spitzer and Scull 1977). These mercantile interests also wanted to divest themselves of the cost of protecting their own enterprises, transferring those costs from the private sector to the state."

Neil Postman, "Technopoly":

“Adolf Eichmann becomes the basic model and metaphor for a bureaucrat in the age of Technopoly. When faced with the charge of crimes against humanity, he argued that he had no part in the formulation of Nazi political or sociological theory; he dealt only with the technical problems of moving vast numbers of people from one place to another. Why they were being moved and, especially, what would happen to them when they arrived at their destination were not relevant to his job. Although the jobs of bureaucrats in today's Technopoly have results far less horrific, Eichmann's answer is probably given five thousand times a day in America alone: I have no responsibility for the human consequences of my decisions. I am only responsible for the efficiency of my part of the bureaucracy, which must be maintained at all costs.”

[1]:https://plsonline.eku.edu/sites/plsonline.eku.edu/files/the-...

I have been trying to find the words to describe this for years, you are far more eloquent than I am! Peacekeepers are indeed what the world needs.
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I think most people don't appreciate that a non-negligible amount of police officers are simply interested in the opportunity to exert violence, and even to kill. The same mindset is observable in homeowners/storeowners with fantasies about defending their property/family from an intruder (exactly where they land on the conversational spectrum between "defend from" and "kill" depends both on their own morality and on the present company). This mindset is expressed even more openly in the military, which makes sense.

If even 1% of police officers have this mindset, that's a spectacular failure of civilized society. In apparent probability, it's somewhere north of 1%. But how small could we realistically get this number via policy (assuming a magical ability to measure it)? It might be so ingrained in present society and/or human nature, and so hard to test for, that we can't eliminate or even satisfactorily minimize it. I hope eventually we take meaningful steps toward the one realistic thing we can attempt: Mercilessly removing such officers from the force when they do make their morality/incompetence clear. Unfortunately, to do this, we would need to somehow work around the despicable protection such officers are granted by their own, and by voters, which is complicated by consisting partly of genuine support for an incredibly difficult and critical job, and partly by unspoken (and sometimes spoken) support for oppression and violence.

It's on the owner too I guess. The article mentions rottweiler, pit bulls, and drug sweeps, and I'm certain some of these owners get these dogs specifically for defense, if not attack. That they end up dead is awful but I'm sure in some cases the owner is to blame more than the police.
A few years ago I was getting some appliances delivered and installed. One of my dogs, a dachshund, got out the front door. As I'm corralling him, I see one of the installers sprint out the front door, slamming it behind him, in obvious fear for his life. Turns out my pit-lab wasn't in her cage, and she wanted to play with the new guy in her house. Of course, he didn't known that, and assumed she was a murderous beast wanting to go for his jugular.

It's a funny story, but had he been in law enforcement (or at least armed, which will be very easy in Texas beginning September 1), I believe that same assumption would have resulted in the death of a sweet family pet.

It's not a funny story. Maintain control of your dog or don't have one as a pet.
Yeah, I don't really see why you're getting downvoted here. The poster let one of his dogs escape his house and left another one loose while an appliance installer who didn't know anything about the dog was there.

When I have people in my house who aren't familiar with my dogs (who are friendly), I put the dogs away and let the people know exactly which door they should not open.

If nothing else it's just very, very rude to leave your dog loose in the house when a worker comes in, unless they say it's okay. You don't know if they're allergic or scared of dogs, and they're there to do a job. Show them the respect of allowing them to do their job uninterrupted by your dog (and don't let your dogs escape your house... that's just basic stuff).

While I mostly agree with you, it was literally a chaotic situation. And like most installers, they weren't stopping to ask what was going on or if it was ok to proceed, they just start carrying stuff in like they own the place. Waiting 1-2 minutes to allow us to grab the one dog and put the other dog in her cage would have been enough on their part.
When people come to the door and you have loose dogs at home, you crack the door and say "one minute, let me put the dogs away," then close the door and put the dogs away. Or you just put them away before you open the door. It's crazy that you think appliance people coming to your door to an appointment you've scheduled with them is some uncontrollable environment in which you couldn't have done anything. It's your job to keep your dogs safe.
“ When I have people in my house who aren't familiar with my dogs (who are friendly), I put the dogs away and let the people know exactly which door they should not open.”

And then they go and open that exact door anyway. I’ve had that happen to me.

Okay, well that's still a very different scenario than just leaving your dogs loose and letting one get out when someone comes to the door.
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Someone was literally walking around in my house. The dog wanted to play. Not sure I understand "maintain control" in that context. If someone stepped on my cat's tail not looking out, would the same criticism apply?
Better to run and look like a coward than to get bit. Looking like a coward in front of a stranger costs you nothing. Misjudging a dog and getting bit can cost you disfigurement or death. You know your dogs; the appliance installer doesn't.

Also, I think it says something about the temperament and worldview of the owners of these dogs that they so often seem very concerned with appearing brave or cowardly.

Yes, and the dachshund is actually the barker and the biter. The installers didn't seem concerned with him.

"worldview of the owners of these dogs": What kind of dogs? Dachshunds? Pits? Labs? In the my experience, "these dogs" is a bit of a code phrase, similar to when politicians have said "you people". As for my worldview, I am opposed to stereotypes and discrimination and do my best to consistent in that.

Why do people fear pitbulls more than yappy ankle biters? I just don't get it!

Feigned ignorance will get you nowhere with me.

As long as we appeal to likelihoods and fear: in 2020, Pit Bulls killed 33, police kill 938. I can understand why people would run from both.
Another point: bragging about how bitey your dachshund is, as though that vindicates your poorly behaved pitbull, really makes me think you shouldn't own dogs. Why didn't you train your dachshund well? I have met well behaved dachshunds, so what is your excuse? Do violent and poorly trained police justify your violent and poorly trained dogs? Is that what you're trying to say?
No, I'm checking stereotypes. Dachshunds are one of the most aggressive breeds and are well known for their stubbornness. Kudos for anyone able to train them to be well behaved (and ditto for well-trained police)

My dog is a pit-lab mix, but it's telling what you refer to her as. And I'm not sure where you're getting "poorly behaved"; she was literally trying to play with someone in her house. The fact that she wasn't barking or biting the guy should be a telling signal of how well trained and behaved she is, I would think. In other words: the "violent and poorly trained dog" was the one the installer ignored, but the well behaved dog was the one he was afraid of.

There is "suicide by cop". Police don't kill people outside of their official orders (ideally), which are given by politics/law - ofc. you can debate these... and there are electric tasers for example to avoid that police has to shoot.
Or maybe he had an irrational fear of dogs. Maybe he went through a trauma or something in the past. How is it funny?
It's not funny, as much as illustrative of stereotypes: he didn't seem worried about the dachshund, who is always more demonstratively aggressive.
A rational person is more concerned around a trained tiger than a house-cat, despite both having the same capricious-but-usually-peaceful temperament. A rational person considers not only the temperament of the animal, but also the damage it could do. Numerous grown adults have been killed by pitbulls. Dachshunds? Not so much.

I think you understand this, but are pretending not to. Let me tell you, feigned ignorance is not persuasive.

Do not think this is funny or smart. Here if this happens he can denounce a dog and it will get picked up by the police if we do not have a good story. And this is not a good story. Be more careful I would think, what if the guy tripped and broke something even if the dog did nothing bad but wanted to play?
Then the same would be true of the dachshund, or my cat, correct?
The premise of bloodsports appeals to dirtbags, who buy these sort of dogs and neglect to train them at best (or very often, train them to be vicious.)
Not in "epidemic" amounts though. And it is always the owners fault of course. It takes a lot of horrible treatment to fuck up a dog badly. We foster a lot of dogs and ones that come in completely fucked up usually turn normal with a lot of tlc. But yes, some are screwed. Even dogs that have been beaten, on a half meter chain, in a shed in the heat for years, they still turn out out ok and don't usually bite even on first approach. You have to know how to approach ofcourse: cops with drawn guns hovering over them probably would not be ideal.

Dogs that are too far gone should be put down: they basically will bite and attack anyone and anything. Still not their fault but they are gone.

It does not take a fucked-up dog for it to be dangerous. All dogs are capable of attacking strangers.

It doesn't matter that they are lovable creatures that never showed any signals of violence, then can change in seconds if them deem the situation bad enough (and what is a bad situation for a dog is really not intuitive for humans).

Not all protective dogs are vicious. My dog is very friendly and allows people to let her, you wouldn’t think she would bite anyone. She has bit exactly one person and that person kicked my gate down on my front door attempting to burglarize my belongings. Am I at “fault” because my dog defends what she knows is our home from a total stranger she knows doesn’t belong?
Does that matter? I have a dog that will protect my home and the onus should be on the police to allow me to cage her before they come in.
I think context matters. If the dog is raised by a drug dealer to be aggressive, and is charging at the policeman, I can't really blame him if something bad happens. I don't think asking kindly to please cage the dog in this context would help.
You may be right about that. That doesn't mean asking first shouldn't be required. I don't think most drug dealers are ignorant enough to think their dog would protect them from the police they are likely using the dogs to defend from their customer base or rivals.
As a runner I've been bit by dogs in two states.

Too many Americans do not treat their dogs as the potentially dangerous animals that they are.

This does not justify shooting random dogs in other situations, does it?
Some of the shootings of dogs are justified, others are not. It depends on the dog and the circumstance, but of course every dog owner will claim their dog was a loveable puppy after the fact.

I am expected to uncritically believe the owners, to believe that all these dogs are harmless and well trained and that they're all being shot for no reason. Well I believe that some of them are being shot for no good reason, but I've seen very little to suggest that most are. And from my interactions with the general public, I am inclined to believe most dogs are, if not dangerous, then at least poorly trained.

That wasn't the intent of the comment. The implied question, is if this is an unusually high incident rate. ie Just how many aggressively dangerous dogs exist and how frequently they are encountered in police action. The statement was an anecdotal sample of an area where people are running, you can get attacked without additional circumstance.

40 years in California, I'd only ever been assaulted by dogs a handful of times and that's because they weren't controlled. Dogs are generally allowed to run freely in their own yards/homes so it makes sense that strangers/police entering yards and homes in a stressful situation, encounter aggressive animals much more frequently.

As a French hiker I can tell you it's the same here. People think that since the dog is nice to them it will be the same with strangers.

Frankly it ruins my hikes so I go out less and less.

What do the Swiss do with their dogs that predominantly leaves them well-behaved and quiescent?
Like (most) German dog owners, take training their dogs seriously, which is why dogs in Germany can be allowed in restaurants and non-food stores.
It's funny now you mention it, I live 20 kilometers from Switzerland and I realize I never went hiking there!

I need to check what are the covid restrictions but if it's OK next time I'll check if their dogs are better behaved than ours.

I hate to stereotype, but the Röstigraben does seem to mean something in terms of dog heeling conduct from the owner.

(Though in this last year, I have seen more misbehaved dogs in the Deutschschweiz than I have seen in all my years here.)

Last weekend, I walked into a restaurant for lunch. A dog was sitting on the bar, between the (presumable) owner and the bartender.

I walked out.

I don’t need to eat my food at a place that allows dog ass on its tables.

I was tempted to take photo and report to the Dept of Health but did not.

Not sure how this anecdote is relevant to the article?

Are you saying that you believe the dogs that bit you should have been shot?

I have been bodyslammed by runners. So there you go, one anecdote for another.
Likewise, too many Americans do not treat their police force as the potentially dangerous animals that they not uncommonly are.

How many people do dogs kill per year in the USA?

How many people do police kill per year in the USA?

I'll wait.

The same could be said about the police’s treatment of ordinary people. Cowardice and impunity.
3/4th of the tweets used as "source" for this hum, "article" are either unavailable or from suspended accounts.

Why is this about "white people" caring about dogs? Non-white people do not care about dogs? Why is this a white people only thing?

"estimates that 25 to 30 pet dogs are killed daily by police"

Approximately 10000 per year, which is about equal to the number of human murder victims, and about ten times the number of humans killed by police (justifiably or not) each year.

There are about 4 times as many humans in the US as dogs: https://financesonline.com/number-of-dogs-in-the-us/

I really wish articles would make context numbers like this clear. I had to poke around. Judge for yourself whether this is an epidemic, but do so based on some numbers that provide some grounding.

Disclaimer: I found these numbers quickly and probably made some mistakes, but I don't think they are wildly off.

I really think they should be forced to use something like a tranquilizer or at least there has to be another response. Cops come into a home and the dog gets killed defending their owner. You can’t really tell a dog they aren’t supposed to do that.
Tranquilizer darts only work fast enough for self defense in video games.
That’s why I said “or another response.”
I'm a bit shocked that if I interpret your numbers correctly, police officers kill about 10% as many people as are killed in murders.
As far as I can tell, that's about right. But to be clear, that says nothing about whether the police shootings are justifiable or not.

It could be that, in many of those incidents, lethal force prevented the deaths of other people. But I don't have numbers to say one way or another.

Isn't it kind of hard to shoot a dog, especially a dangerous one? They move around a lot faster than humans.

Maybe a lot of them are just barking and looking scary, but don't know enough to be afraid of a gun, so stand still?

A vicious dog won't immediately attack. They'll make a stand barking and growling. If they're impeding your progress that's when you shoot.
When there is a stranger in their territory (the home), many dogs will immediately attack.
> A vicious dog won't immediately attack.

It's trivial to find videos of dog attacks that contradict your absolutist assertion.

Presumably not every attempt to shoot at dog is immediately successful either.
And yet, you provided none. Curious.

(I've been attacked by dogs multiple times, and indeed, they warn before attacking.)

And fear mongering at it's finest! Let's see, give a crazy stat that ruffles feathers, 25 to 30 dogs killed daily. But wait! Let's dig into the source of said numbers! It's right there after all.

>No one keeps records on how many privately owned dogs are shot and killed each year by American law enforcement officers so there are no hard figures. But a perusal of the Web and social media will tell you it's a lot.

Hmmm... based on self claimed social media... wow, that's some hardcore journalism skills let me tell you. Because only the truth is allowed on social media. Oh how knee jerky the HN community has become just for some virtue signal points... I swear, next you all are going to claim an api service will save the trees...