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http://www.star-telegram.com/2014/06/27 ... .html?rh=1

Note the officers in this department are trained on interacting with canines.

Yay! One to make me smile a little more.

Awesome job by the LEO's!

Hard to believe a vicious dog would run from a Chihuahua. The residents might have mistaken "following wagging tail" with "aggressively chasing"...

Carter said the stray dog, who was wagging its tail and didn’t appear to be aggressive, ran away behind a nearby house as he tried to approach it. But then the dog immediately came running back to the officers as it was chased from that yard by a tiny chihuahua.

Yup, that's one vicious dog, alright! (The chihuahua, that is!)

That's the way police / dog interactions used to go routinely.

It's good to see that starting to come back.

All LEOs should take some sort of class that helps them deal with situations with canines so that we have more encounters like these.

I admit to a health fear of chihuahuas. They're crazy.

rbwhatever1 wrote:[ Image ]

Now THAT'S scary!

Cudo's to the officer for his handling of the situation.

I have a pitbull and he is the most docile dog I have ever owned, unless you break into the house then all bets are off but thats another story.

On the other hand, I have been in the a/c business over 40 years and have been bitten twice, both times by a chihuahua and both times on the backside while kneeling down in front of a unit. I am glad those dogs are not the size of a pitbull

I think the key is this PD has formal training on dealing with dogs. What a novel idea. How come this hasn't been thought of before?!?!? A job well done by this officer and this PD.

gljjt wrote:I think the key is this PD has formal training on dealing with dogs. What a novel idea. How come this hasn't been thought of before?!?!? A job well done by this officer and this PD.

Because it didn't used to be necessary.

Our agency didn't have any special training on differentiating a dog that was dangerous from one who was not, but there wasn't an officer on the street who couldn't routinely perform that simple task with confidence and accuracy and handle the situation without gunfire. We responded to lots of dog calls and encountered dogs during many other types of incidents, but in my 20 years with that agency of 200 officers, I can only remember one situation where an officer fired on a dog. That one instance involved a charging Doberman in an open field where the officer had no other way to protect himself.

One of the first calls I went on as a recruit in field training was for a dog with a chain wrapped around its neck so tightly it was partially choking. The dog was clearly scared and snarled and snapped at me as I approached, but the thought of shooting it never entered my mind. I borrowed a pair of pliers from the dog's elderly owner and approached the dog slowly while speaking to it to let it know I wasn't a threat. It calmed down some and allowed me to restrain it while I used the pliers to separate a link and remove the chain. The dog returned to its owner, I returned the pliers, and I went back out on patrol. That was the norm in police work back then, and neither the dog's owner, I, nor my fellow officers thought anything of it.

Officers in those times were expected to routinely exercise both common sense and compassion in their work. Stupidity and thuggish behavior was not (and still isn't) tolerated in well managed agencies.

Those expectations have apparently fallen by the wayside in some places due to leadership failures. Where that is true, the results aren't pretty and they're not limited to cruel treatment of dogs.

Excaliber wrote:Those expectations have apparently fallen by the wayside in some places due to leadership failures. Where that is true, the results aren't pretty and they're not limited to cruel treatment of dogs.

When there are the kinds of results you're alluding to, it's always a leadership failure....or just plain rotten leadership.

VMI77 wrote:

Excaliber wrote:Those expectations have apparently fallen by the wayside in some places due to leadership failures. Where that is true, the results aren't pretty and they're not limited to cruel treatment of dogs.

When there are the kinds of results you're alluding to, it's always a leadership failure....or just plain rotten leadership.

For better or worse, the character of an organization always reflects the character of the person at the top.