In 2016, veterinarian Dan Wentz started a fundraiser to implant titanium crowns on the teeth of a 106-pound German Shepherd police dog.
In Ferguson, Missouri.
“Given all that’s happened,” said Wentz, “I want to make sure we are doing what we can to help keep these dogs on the street.”
Ferguson, of course, is where the 2014 police murder of unarmed, 18-year-old Michael Brown touched off an uprising that sparked the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement around the nation, and brought horrific police repression of protesters in response.
Wentz’s campaign was launched after the uprising. It came after the Ferguson Police Department had taken a police dog to the memorial left to Brown to piss on it. And it was after a Justice Department investigation into the Ferguson police found that officers only sicced dogs on Black people, including children, and that the dogs were used “not to counter a physical threat but to inflict punishment.”
This story isn’t an exception, though. Throughout the country, police departments cynically exploit people’s love of dogs to make the abuse of human beings by police K9 units and the abuse of the dogs themselves seem acceptable, obscuring a mass of brutality, corruption and abuse.
The “Rin Tin Tin” propaganda used by police departments for community outreach efforts must be confronted with the real history of decades of brutality — toward human and animal alike — as a result of the use of police dogs.
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Like many aspects of modern policing, police dogs have their historical roots in slavery and colonialism.
Cuban bloodhounds were tools in the hands of professional slave catchers for recapturing and brutalizing fleeing slaves, and instruments of psychological terror to prevent others from trying to escape. From slavery to Jim Crow to the era of mass incarceration, attack dogs have been a continuous feature of anti-Black violence.
It’s still the case today that police dogs are used disproportionately to maul…