COMMENTARY
Charity Vogel: Cops can’t go soft when dogs charge
Let me get this straight. Cops get complaints about a house in South Buffalo. They put the home under surveillance. Officers say they see drug sales go down there; they even send an informant in to make a buy. (According to the cops, he came out with prescription painkillers). Based on the evidence, a judge signs a warrant.
Finally, on a mild Saturday evening, cops storm into the house to clean it out.
Only two things stand in their way. Make that two enormously intimidating things: a pit bull and a pit bull-boxer mix.
We all know what happened next. Detective Sgt. Daniel Rinaldo shot and killed the two dogs that police said ran toward SWAT team members as they charged into the Indian Church Road home on March 28.
Now, here’s how you know you’re in America in 2009: The police officer who pulled the trigger, not anybody living in the house, is the one taking heat. (So much so that police brass called a news conference last week to explain the dog deaths.)
Come on, people. It’s unfortunate that two dogs died. But it’s a tiny footnote to a long day of police work that included nine raids in South Buffalo and Kaisertown.
And Rinaldo? He did what he had to do.
Put yourself in his place. He was running into a home where cops said an informant had recently bought drugs. The mayor later said some of the nine addresses busted in the raids were dealing as much as $5,000 a day. How can you blame Rinaldo for taking the cautious action?
No one was arrested at the Indian Church home during the raid. But that doesn’t change what Rinaldo thought he was getting into. Cops’ dim view of the situation was confirmed the next day, when one man in the house—the boyfriend of an occupant, a guy paroled last year after doing time on a drug charge— was arrested and charged with felony assault for what police described as an attack on a neighbor he thought might have been involved with the raid.
The sorts of individuals who would attract this kind of intense police attention are not in any contest for citizen of the year; neither should their animals be presumed to be especially well mannered. Dogs are trained by humans. And, as police have learned, fierce dogs in houses where drug activity occurs are more likely to be aggressive than kitten-like. (It can happen elsewhere, as well; last week a cop hurt his ankle scrambling away from another charging pit bull while checking out a routine tip.)
The cops did the right thing in South Buffalo. This one isn’t even close.
In order to check my reaction, I asked some pet-lovers what they thought. At PetCo in West Seneca, I met Tracey Lichon, who was showing her 3-year-old daughter, Shannon, the hamsters.
Lichon has owned dogs, and loves animals. But she said she understood why Rinaldo killed the ones that got in his way. Recently, on a trip to Pennsylvania, Lichon was walking her daughter along a road when a strange dog charged out of a driveway and jumped at them; it was a gut-clenching moment, because animals can be unpredictable, the 33- year-old mom said.
“It’s always a shame when people kill an animal, for any reason,” Lichon said. “But you have to put the human being first.”
Agreed. That’s why what happened in South Buffalo was sad, but just. Cops can’t go soft on dogs when doing so might put them—and, by extension, all of us—at risk.
And the bigger message here is simple.
There’s an easy way to keep Fido alive. It’s called behaving.
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