The Dog of War

Yesterday, I promised that I was going to be following up last week's quick post on the police arrest and shooting in Hawthorne, California that ended with a dog being killed with something a little more thoughtful. Well, that piece is now up over at the Daily Banter. This whole thing has been a great debate to have and I can certainly understand where everyone's passions are coming from with regard to a case of a dog being shot by the cops. But do me a favor and try to keep an open mind when reading this piece and my take on the shooting. Suffice it to say, I've been mulling the objections and the points made against my arguments over in my head throughout the past week and while I still think the police were justified, I've definitely softened my language and a few of my more absolutist statements a little.

Anyway, here's the opening:

"The coolest job I ever had I got at the very young age of 14. It was the coolest job any 14-year-old should be allowed to have, the coolest job anybody should be allowed to have, period. When I was 14, a friend of my family’s got me part-time summer work at the Broward County police academy, as an actor in its live-action police training exercises. Basically, it went like this: the instructors would set up a scenario aimed at recreating a real-life situation a cop might encounter in his or her daily routine, from something as simple as a suspicious or stolen vehicle stop to something as complex as a hostage standoff; they’d hand me a modified gun loaded with blanks which I’d slip into my waistband; then they’d basically give me one instruction — if the recruit didn’t bother to check me out, taking it for granted that I was just a kid, draw and kill that recruit the first chance I got."

Read the Rest Here

E-Mail of the Week

I almost never post e-mails that I get, whether complimentary or critical, mostly because I feel like the privacy of those who reach out to me off-the-record deserves to be protected. But every once in a while somebody steps up and behaves like a fucking idiot and when that happens I see no need to be decent about it.

Suffice it to say, last week's quickie post on the Hawthorne dog shooting garnered not just a lot of passionate debate in the comment section, it also won me quite a bit of hate mail from dog lovers. It should go without saying that the killing of Leon Rosby's dog was really tragic and unfortunate; like just about everybody else on the planet, I'm a huge dog fan and it made my heart sink watching that awful scene unfold. But I still think that given the circumstances as they occurred, the shooting was justified.

I'll get more into it in another piece I'm putting together on the shooting and the reaction to it, but for now, please enjoy the comments of one Nicole Haley, who apparently has a huge problem with my take on the incident -- as well as with the English language:

"Ugly fuk ... U an informer piece of shit.. Prob ducking that pigs cock like that faggot u r. Ur a loser n should get a life..
That cops a waste bytch n had no reason to even go over there watch the video again idiot."

Why am I bothering with this? Because Nicole's been pretty relentless in e-mailing me over the past week, so, in the words of William Sadler's evil Colonel Stuart character from Die Hard 2, that ends our object lesson for this evening. Anybody want her e-mail address?

Dog Down Afternoon

I'm going to make this really quick.

If you're a faithful internet denizen then there's a pretty good chance that by now you've actually seen the video of -- or are at least aware of -- a cop in Hawthorne, California shooting a dog four times and killing it during the arrest of its owner. Is it shocking? Yes. Is it tragic? Certainly.

Was it a good shoot? Was it a justified use of deadly force? Absolutely.

If you can handle it, watch the video from start to finish. 52-year-old Leon Rosby is walking his 80-pound rottweiler past a police scene when he starts videotaping it, which is no big deal. When he starts yelling at the cops, though -- antagonizing them -- that's a different story. There could very well be a racial element to this story, potentially one no more specific than the history of friction between the police and the black community here in Southern California, and that deserves to be taken into consideration.

However, once the two cops on the scene walk over and start to ostensibly arrest Rosby, the dog comes after them. I get that this is the standard reaction of a really great dog to a threat on its owner, but it's still a very angry 80-pound rottweiler we're talking about. One cop tries to grab the dog's leash, which to be honest if I'm dealing with a dog like that would be way beyond the call of duty -- though it's an understandable reaction because nobody wants to see a dog hurt -- but once it lunges, that's it. All bets are off.

If I'm that cop, and it's me or a very big dog that's about to rip me to shreds, that dog's gotta be stopped, no matter what it takes. If I don't have a taser drawn or a beanbag round in a shotgun nearby, I'm shooting it. Simple as that.

A lot of cops are serious pricks, no doubt. But just as many are good men and women under unbelievable stress in a job where if they hesitate they get killed and if they don't they get publicly crucified. They do a job I wouldn't want in a million years, which is why I tend to cut them some slack until they've proven that they don't fucking deserve it. Shooting a rottweiler that's coming after you just doesn't seem all that controversial to me.

The New York Daily News: Graphic Video as Police Shoot Dog/7.2.13