Folks around here are upset (and understandably so) about an incident that occurred the other day down in Hawthorne, which is about ten miles south of where I live. A man named Leon Rosby was walking his pet Rottweiler and he happened upon a crime scene. He put the dog in his car. Police officers ordered Rosby to turn down a loud radio he was playing and when he didn't comply, they handcuffed him. Rosby had some history with the cops and one recognized him and considered him a "troublemaker."
When they started to lead away his master, the dog leaped out of the car and began barking and snarling at the officers. One of them then drew his gun, fired several times and killed the dog…
…and a neighbor recorded the whole thing on video. (I'm not going to link to it. It's not hard to find if you have some desire to view it and I'm kinda sorry I did.)
All the newscasts I saw said something like, "This was the worst thing you could ever see." Personally, I can think of worse things…like, say, if police had killed a human being instead of a dog. They do that too, you know. But killing that dog was still pretty awful. You have to wonder: Wasn't there something else they could have done there? I'm also wondering if the officer would have been as quick to do that if he'd realized it was all being caught on video.
I have to own up to a slight prejudice here. I've had some bad encounters with dog owners who were utterly blind to the fact that their dogs aren't well-behaved children who never do anything wrong. It's bad enough when those well-behaved children crap on your lawn but several times in my life, I've been attacked or injured by dogs — once, enough to require professional medical treatment — by dogs who should have been kept on a tighter literal or figurative leash by their owners. And in every case, I blame the owners. My first reaction is to blame the owners.
The most recent time was two or three years ago. Earl Kress and I were over at Farmers Market, just walking somewhere. From out of nowhere, a dog — and it may have been a Rottweiler — ran up and for no visible reason, biting at random, sank his teeth into my arm. I had on a heavy jacket and he didn't break the skin but it was still rather startling and disturbing. Moments later, a woman appeared to grab his leash and I heard a lot of "He never does this kind of thing" and "He's a good boy" and the one I really liked…"He didn't mean it." I wanted to say to her, "How do you know? Maybe he loves the Spirit comic book and doesn't like what Sergio and I are doing on it!"
I wasn't hurt but there were bare-armed, bare-legged children all around and if the pooch had gone for one of them instead of me, something pretty horrible would have happened. What annoyed me most about the incident was the woman's attitude that she was in no way responsible for what her dog did, no matter where she took him.
Getting back to Hawthorne: Killing that dog was just terrible. Rosby should have put the window of the car up far enough that the dog could breathe but couldn't get out…but that's not a capital offense, punishable by executing the Rottweiler. Hawthorne Police are said to be "investigating" and I expect that they'll wind up pointing to something in a manual that says what that officer did was utterly according to procedure. At worst, he may have decided a bit prematurely that the dog was dangerous but he had to be trusted to make that call.
I wouldn't expect anything more to come of it except Rosby suing the police and worsening of the already-bad relationship the force there has with the citizens of Hawthorne. Oh, and I'd imagine the officers down there are being told, "If you need to draw your gun or rough someone up, make sure there's no one around who has a video camera and a YouTube account!"