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Police use of a biting dog to arrest a protester during racial justice demonstrations this week in Walnut Creek signals that some cops still don’t get it.
With tensions heightened after the May 25 death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, it’s critical that police balance maintaining order with defusing mounting anger over law enforcement treatment of African Americans.
That means understanding and demonstrating sensitivity to the historical injustices that got us to where we are today. Bringing out the dogs undermines that message.
Yet, that’s exactly what a Contra Costa SWAT team did when demonstrators Monday evening blocked traffic on Interstate 680. Of course, once the dogs were there, they were used when tensions rose.
A young black man, identified by police as Joseph Malott, sustained bites to his knee and hand after he was brought down by police and one of the two dogs that were on the scene. Malott did not respond to an email message sent to his father and a Facebook message sent directly to him.
Malott had thrown a tear gas canister back at police as they were trying to clear the entrance ramp. He was arrested on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon on a police officer and resisting/obstructing an officer.
The weapon was the tear gas canister that police has previously thrown his way, which if it was truly deadly raises serious questions about why police were using it in the first place for crowd control. But, beyond that, photos from the scene and accounts from our reporter, Annie Sciacca, show that using dogs was not only a tone-deaf response, it was excessive.
For those who remember the nation’s civil rights movement, police dogs and water hoses serve as a searing reminder of law enforcement excesses used to intimidate protesters in the Jim Crow South.
It was perhaps best captured in an Associated Press photo, taken May 3, 1963, showing members of Eugene “Bull” Connor’s Birmingham, Ala., police force siccing a canine on a peaceful teenage protester.
But the history of using dogs as a tool of racial oppression goes back much further. Dogs were used in the South to track down runaway slaves and to hunt escaped inmates who had often been unjustifiably imprisoned.
The abusive use of dogs has continued into this century. A report found that all of the Los Angeles Sheriff Department’s Canine Special Detail’s dog bite victims in the first six months of 2013 were black or Latino.
Although President Trump cavalierly threatened Saturday to sic “the most vicious dogs” on protesters outside the White House, Bay Area police chiefs should know better.
Many of them in the past week have issued statements condemning the killing of George Floyd and compassion for the oppression the black community has undergone. Those words are undermined when they send the dogs.
In this case, the SWAT unit for the Walnut Creek, Pleasant Hill, Martinez and San Ramon police departments was helping in downtown Walnut Creek with crowd control during Monday’s rally and march.
But when hundreds broke off and headed for the freeway, the SWAT team was assigned to the freeway to help the CHP. And they brought along their dogs, said the head of the unit, Lt. Steve Brinkley of the San Ramon Police Department, “because they’re part of our team.”
The CHP had been surrounded by protesters and needed reinforcement, Brinkley said Tuesday. Photos and accounts from the scene don’t show that. Brinkley said the dogs were not at the front of the line. Photos and Sciacca’s account show that was true early on, but not when police moved to clear the crowd.
When the dog was used to bring down Malott, most of the crowd had dispersed after police fired tear gas and non-lethal rounds. The cops had sufficient personnel to swarm him; they didn’t need canine assistance.
Let’s recognize and appreciate the tough job police have faced controlling crowds and stopping looting throughout the Bay Area this past week. But that doesn’t excuse the insensitive use of dogs. Sadly, when I talked to him, Brinkley was unfazed and uneducated about law enforcement’s troubled canine history.
But Martinez Police Chief Manjit Sappal understood. The officers handling the dogs came from his department. “In terms of optics, it doesn’t look good,” he said. Going forward for protests, “We won’t be sending them (dogs) any longer.”
Let’s hope other cops get the message, too.
