The video shows a LaGrange police officer shooting and killing a mixed-breed pit bull. According to police reports, the dog acted aggressive toward officers and a young child. But the owner is telling a different story.

“She was a big dog, she was playful, she liked to jump around. But she’s never acted aggressively toward anybody,” says the dog’s owner Marcus Mays.

Mary Coleman says the dog attacked her six-year-old daughter.

“I hear a big dog growling and I turn around and it was running towards us. I shut my daughter behind me and I started to yell and kick at it,” Coleman said.

It was late March when Coleman and her daughter were waiting for the bus. A dog wrestled out of its leash and came running at Coleman’s daughter. Coleman was able to fight off the dog and go back to her trailer to call police.

“It followed me down here and it started acting real calm again. I got the chain around it and fed it some dog food. That might have been the trick, feeding it dog food,” Coleman said.

According to the video, the dog looks calm as officers put a collar around its neck and only gets agitated when police use an animal restraint pole.

The video certainly does not give any indication that this is a vicious dog. At the beginning, it is leashed to a truck and when the officers try to collar it, the dog retreats instead of attacking. It’s at least possible that the dog was a danger to public safety, but given that the dog was restrained at the time, this seems like something that could be determined after a judicial hearing of some kind. Furthermore, the video does show that the police were having some difficulty taking the dog into custody, but they could have presumably tranquilized the dog instead of killing it.

This case once again highlights the importance of recording devices in holding government accountable. The proliferation of cell phone cameras and audio recorders cannot help but shine a light on unpleasant occurrences that previously would have been swept under the rug. However, unless we change the way that police deal with domestic animals, nothing will change in the long run. If we want to prevent the unnecessary shootings of family pets, localities need to start defining more precisely which conditions are necessary and sufficient for police to use lethal force against pets.

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As Radley Balko puts it, “this wasn’t a ‘botched raid.’ It was a routine raid. The police got the correct house. They found the guy they were after. They arrested him. No one was killed. Most of these raids don’t turn up huge stashes of drugs or weapons. Most result in misdemeanor charges.”

There is some reason to hope that — in Columbia, at least — using SWAT teams for nonviolent crimes will become the exception rather than the rule. Columbia Police Chief Ken Burton concedes that the department has “utilized SWAT routinely in circumstances and situations where we should not,” and promises that new reforms should cause the number of SWAT raids to “plummet.” Those reforms should be strengthened and expanded statewide to help ensure that SWAT teams are used for the intended purposes and not to shock and awe nonviolent people.

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I am a US Army officer, currently serving in Afghanistan. My first thought on reading this story is this: Most American police SWAT teams probably have fewer restrictions on conducting forced entry raids than do US forces in Afghanistan.

For our troops over here to conduct any kind of forced entry, day or night, they have to meet one of two conditions: have a bad guy (or guys) inside actively shooting at them; or obtain permission from a 2-star general, who must be convinced by available intelligence (evidence) that the person or persons they’re after is present at the location, and that it’s too dangerous to try less coercive methods. The general can be pretty tough to convince, too. (I’m a staff liason, and one of my jobs is to present these briefings to obtain the required permission.)

Generally, our troops, including the special ops guys, use what we call “cordon and knock”: they set up a perimeter around the target location to keep people from moving in or out,and then announce their presence and give the target an opportunity to surrender. In the majority of cases, even if the perimeter is established at night, the call out or knock on the gate doesn’t happen until after the sun comes up.

Oh, and all of the bad guys we’re going after are closely tied to killing and maiming people.

What might be amazing to American cops is that the vast majority of our targets surrender when called out.

I don’t have a clear picture of the resources available to most police departments, but even so, I don’t see any reason why they can’t use similar methods.

I can’t personally vouch for anything this officer claims about Army protocol, but if what he claims is true, it’s very disturbing.

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I certainly agree with McDavid that it is inappropriate to use SWAT teams for nonviolent crimes — but, unfortunately, that is not one of the reforms already implemented by the Columbia Police Department. That said, the department is moving in the right direction, even if not quickly enough for my taste. New regulations for SWAT raids include: an order that search warrants be served within a “reasonable” period (usually eight hours) after they are issued; eliminating the power for the SWAT commander or narcotics sergeant to order such a raid, instead requiring a department captain’s order; and, continual surveillance of the area to be searched before the raid to ensure that the intelligence is correct and that, say, the suspect’s young child is not in the home.

I think there are three major policies missing from these reforms. First, there should be a public record of every instance in which a SWAT team is used, and for what purpose. Without such a record, it will be impossible for the public to hold the police department accountable for any departures from the other policies. (I contacted the Columbia Police Department earlier today to ask whether such a record exists, or whether it will be required in the future, but have not heard back from them yet.) Second, there is no change to the department’s policy on using lethal force against animals. They could consider using non-lethal methods of subduing an animal, such as pepper spray. At the very least, though, a more thorough definition of “aggressive” behavior seems warranted. Finally, the use of SWAT-style raids should be legally confined to violent situations. Unless officers can prove that there is a high probability that the suspect is armed and likely to resist, a SWAT raid designed to confuse and terrify is more likely to lead to violence than prevent it.

It is again worth mentioning that events like this are hardly isolated incidents. Just last month, a police officer in Bellefontaine Neighbors in North Saint Louis County shot and killed a dog under the false impression that it was a different dog that had been reported to be vicious and on the loose. The state of Missouri should institute stricter guidelines for both SWAT teams and the use of lethal force (even against domestic animals) in order to avoid tragedies like these in the future.

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Regardless of your opinions about marijuana, I think we can all agree that it is an inappropriate use of force to call out the SWAT team for misdemeanor offenses. Granted, the police argue that they suspected Whitworth was selling marijuana, and it is certainly possible that they were right but happened to raid his house when he was essentially sold out. However, the fact that the police department’s intelligence indicated that Whitworth’s son was not present when, in fact, he lived there suggests that they did not really do their homework on the case.

This case highlights the need for greater information about the use of SWAT raids in Missouri, but it is hardly an isolated incident. Cheye Calvo is the mayor of Berwyn Heights, Md., and in 2008 the Prince George’s County Sheriff’s Department deployed a SWAT team to his house after a package containing drugs meant for someone else was delivered to his house. In that case, as well, the officers shot and killed Calvo’s dogs, two Labrador retrievers. (They always seem to shoot the dogs.) Calvo fought back and was instrumental in passing a law in Maryland that requires all police departments in the state to report when and why they deploy SWAT teams. The results so far in Maryland have not been encouraging:

Over the last six months of 2009, SWAT teams were deployed 804 times in the state of Maryland, or about 4.5 times per day. In Prince George’s County alone, with its 850,000 residents, a SWAT team was deployed about once per day. According to a Baltimore Sun analysis, 94 percent of the state’s SWAT deployments were used to serve search or arrest warrants, leaving just 6 percent in response to the kinds of barricades, bank robberies, hostage takings, and emergency situations for which SWAT teams were originally intended.

If Missouri police uses SWAT forces for similar purposes, we have a right to know and a duty to do something about it.

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A recent demonstration by the Missouri State Highway Patrol SWAT team had students ducking for cover and later upset at least one parent.

On April 8, about 27 students — mostly high school juniors and seniors — were taking part in a Student Alliance Program course in the highway patrol hangar at the Jefferson City airport. As part of a demonstration by Troop F, a SWAT officer rolled a “flashbang” grenade under the seats of the students without their knowledge.

The grenade, a non-lethal weapon used to stun or divert the attention of criminals when tactical teams enter a building, went off, emitting a loud noise, a burst of light and smoke.

Thankfully, no one was seriously injured, but if police officers have become so desensitized to flashbangs that this can be considered normal behavior, the SWAT team is raiding far too many houses.

Via Radley Balko.

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