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K9 Unit Dogs – The Thirteenth Amendment abolished domestic slavery as well as an 1883 Supreme Court decision calling it a “sign and constitution”. However, the change left behind some infamous episodes. In particular, it is legal to enslave people convicted of crimes. But there is another “sign and phenomenon” of slavery that we need to eradicate: the use of K9 units by police. The police practice of using dogs to attack people stems from the slave practice of using slave dogs to attack enslaved people. This coercive narrative harms people and animals to maintain the racial and economic interests of those in power. We can honor the Thirteenth Amendment’s promise to free our society from slavery, in all its signs and manifestations, by removing dogs from police service.

State-sanctioned dog attacks, such as those carried out by modern police dog units, were common in cottage slavery. Lawyer Madeline Wasilchuk talks about how white slaves “viewed the enslaved’s attempt to gain freedom as a form of theft of valuable property that was rightfully recaptured by brute force.” The use of dog attacks to protect the economic interests of slaveholders was legal and therefore not an unusual act by some fanatics. Wasilchuk explains that the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 legalized slave patrols’ ability to capture slaves in free states, often accompanied by hunters, and the act was later nicknamed the Bloody Bill. Attorney Michael Switara emphasized that these dog attacks were deliberately gruesome. Switara explains that in the 1700s, slaves “bred Cuban bloodhounds to oppress blacks” and that “dog bite wounds were so common that they” were physical signs of slavery. to become “symbols used to identify [black] fugitives in bounty advertisements.”

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In addition to the violence inflicted by these dogs, the dogs themselves had coercive, non-consensual partners. Swistara rightly argues that police dogs themselves have been and still are subject to the carceral state as a weapon used to perpetuate racial and economic inequality. Slave owners had to deliberately break the bond between humans and dogs, mankind’s best friend. In order to enlist dogs in the racial subjugation of blacks and create hostility among animals toward blacks, “dogs were enslaved by forcing enslaved people to beat dogs[…] while others planned chases or ordered dogs to attack enslaved people. There is a support of trees.

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Compounding this divide, slave owners fed their dogs a diet rich in meat and denied it to enslaved humans. The institution of slavery was so desperate to suppress any connection between enslaved people and dogs that these states made it illegal for enslaved people to own dogs, arguing that dog ownership was tantamount to gun ownership. Dogs had to be trained to recognize and attack blacks because they were innately unable to recognize racial differences, many “white southerners”, including Thomas Jefferson, believed that blacks smelled, looked, felt and tasted different. To find differences between races that are not prior to humans, but are objectively present. As Wasilchuk aptly summarizes, “By treating dogs’ perceptions of their handlers’ prejudices as innate, white Southerners used their animals to project racial and ethnic subordination.” Dogs thus became forced partners in state violence.

This forced cooperation with slave dogs evolved into modern police K9 units. After the abolition of chattel slavery, Wasilchuk shows that the state-sanctioned use of dogs to attack humans did not become widespread again until the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Some of the most famous images from the civil rights movement include images and videos of police officers directing German shepherds to attack black people, many of whom were children. Just as blacks freed from slavery threatened an unjust economic system, black civil rights protesters attacked by police dogs threatened an unjust Jim Crow economic system.

A historical example of cruelty and forcing animals to attack humans for profit. According to a public records request, Houston Police Department officials reported that dogs strangled 104 people between March 2022 and May 2023. Of the 104 people attacked by this one police department’s K9 unit, at least 77 were charged with non-violent crimes, or none at all. A 2019 study that examined more than 32,000 emergency room visits from police dog attacks between 2005 and 2013 found that 42 percent of the victims were black.

In addition, the prison industrial complex includes a network of companies that make money off the police, incarceration and enslavement of prisoners, a network of businesses that profit from people caught by police dogs who are then forced to work for money or no money. .

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Modern law enforcement agencies subject police dogs to brutal and coercive training with cuffs, choke chains, and pain. These methods increase aggression by promising dogs that they will bite if they end up suffering. In a country that claims to love its dogs, police dogs are used as weapons, sacrificed in situations where they could be killed, left to die in hot patrol cars and auctioned off property if they are forced to ‘serve’. condition. Although police dogs have the status of “officer”, this derogatory designation does not give permission for dogs to “work” as police officers or risk their lives. Despite the ban on animal cruelty, these laws do not change the fact that these dogs (and all animals) are still legal “property” used and abused for the economic and racial interests of those in power.

And, contrary to popular belief, dogs are not an “essential” element of law enforcement. Police dogs are not really good at what they do. Studies have shown that drug sniffing dogs often produce false positives, especially when searching outside or inside vehicles. When police set a dog on a person, the dogs do not respond to commands to stop biting, instead harassing people for several minutes and tearing flesh when pulled. Studies have shown that police dog bites are more serious than normal dog bites and result in more frequent hospitalizations. While slaves’ dogs were beaten to see black people as a threat, today’s dogs reflect the racist bias of their police officers; In a 2011 investigation, the Chicago Tribune found that Chicago Police Department dogs had not detected drugs in three years. 73 percent of the time they alerted Latino drivers with a drug-sniffing dog. 

Well-funded propaganda campaigns featuring cute police dog mascots, paw patrols, and robodogs hide the violent, coercive, and anti-black truth about the practice of using dogs to attack people. It makes it difficult for lawyers to keep their Thirteenth Amendment promises.

In order to successfully prosecute this practice under the Thirteenth Amendment, Congress must first declare the practice to be a “sign and incident” of slavery. Congress labeled “racially motivated violence” a sign and phenomenon of slavery, allowing advocates and scholars to highlight the racial violence of state-sanctioned dog attacks. When the Civil Rights Corps sued the Harris County Sheriff’s Office in February 2023 for leaving a black man’s dog lying on the ground with his arms outstretched, attorney Shirley Lavarco was able to make a clear connection to the historical use of slave dogs. South.

Behind The Badge: Police K9s

The abolition of slavery and slavery means the refusal to coerce people and animals to maintain the racial and economic interests of those in power. If we want to preserve the Thirteenth Amendment and preserve it at all, then the removal of dogs from police service is an important place.

Is a former state and federal public defender and is currently a senior attorney with the Civil Rights Corps. In her professional and political work she focuses on decriminalization, criminal justice, animal liberation and international human rights. He is a writer

And an article titled “Occupational Violence in Academics and Misconduct” to be published in the CUNY Law Review in 2024.

The Civil Rights Corps is an attorney that protests across the country against police abuses and pretrial detention. His writings on the prison industrial complex and the destruction of international human rights can be found here

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