A few weeks ago, two California lawmakers introduced a bill that would ban the use of police dogs to arrest or apprehend suspects — or as a form of crowd control.
The California Department of Justice says in 2021, police dogs caused more serious injuries or deaths than either tasers or batons, and that nearly two-thirds of use-of-force incidents involving dogs were against people who are Black or Latino.
San Jose Democratic Assemblyman Ash Kalra, one of the bill’s authors, said, “Canine units are used not just in a disproportionate manner against poor Black and Brown community members, but just their existence serves to terrorize and to create a menacing environment in communities that are struggling to survive.”
That terror he talked about is captured in one of the iconic images of the Civil Rights movement: In 1963 Birmingham, Alabama, Police Chief Bull Connor turned fire hoses and police dogs on nonviolent protesters. Afterward, Black and white communities in the city clashed in a situation that turned increasingly dangerous.
That moment is just one chapter in a centuries-long practice of police using dogs to terrorize people. The Jim Crow era, the antebellum slave patrols, and even the Spanish conquistadors used trained dogs to overpower Indigenous people as they colonized the New World. That’s all according to Tyler Parry, a historian and professor of African American and African Diaspora studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
He says that the use of dogs for surveillance and containment goes back to days of chattel slavery, where they were mobilized to ensure people didn’t run away from plantations.
Many dogs were specifically bred for brutality and were trained to attack people of color. Among the Spanish and Portuguese, some Black men were forced to raise the animals, which included withholding food from them and staking them to the ground. Parry says some written accounts from formerly enslaved people theorized that hounds were interbred with dogs that were faster or stronger.
“In their minds, that dog was actually being conditioned to see a person of African descent — and particularly a man of African descent — as an enemy. And so once they basically find the dog suitable, this usually meant that the dog could track and attack the person once they ran away, that dog could actually be sold on market for this specific purpose of catching enslaved people who were trying to escape for freedom.”
In Nazi Germany, German Shepherds were a favorite of Adolf Hitler. He saw them as a symbol of great strength and intimidation. Now, they’re used by police and for military work.
“It seems that when people appropriated the German Shepherd for their own, it was with the intent that this is a dog that would symbolize authority, it would symbolize order, and it would symbolize conformity to the demands of the states. And so when the dogs are used for police work, particularly by the 1950s, as canine units are established, the reputation of the German Shepherd preceded it.”
While Parry says German Shepherds aren’t deliberately associated with Nazi Germany today, its legacy persists today. That includes an investigation by the NAACP that found that dog trainers who lived in Nazi Germany were found in parts of the American South training dogs for police work.
“When you even consider the types of commands that even dogs today take in police work, many of them respond to German commands. And some of the dog breeding ranches or locations actually do have names that resemble Nazi Germany. And so particularly during the Civil Rights Movement, that memory is palpable, and the continued use of these dogs in a post-civil rights America is a strong statement that there's an unwillingness within the many American governments to actually address the symbols of terror that continue to haunt marginalized communities in the United States.”
While Parry admits dogs and humans have a relationship dating back thousands of years, he’s hesitant of their role in police work.
“A dog can be very affectionate in one's time of need, or it can be very aggressive if it senses that the owner themselves are nervous. And so the essential issue is that regardless of what a handler might claim, the dog can get out of control at any point. Because if a canine unit is brought, say, to a protest, what is the intended goal of bringing the dog for crowd control? Because effectively, what you've told the crowd is that I am willing to sick this dog on you, if I perceive that you're getting out of line, or if you run away after I'd give you a command.”
He adds that using police dogs also reflects a “guilty before proven innocent” mentality.
“This extends back into the era of slavery to where enslaved people, once they gained freedom and wrote down their autobiographies or provided some commentary about their lives, they would actually talk about being bitten by dogs and how every time they would look at a reflection of themselves, they would see a dog bite on their shoulder or on their thigh. And it was just a constant reminder of that terror and that trauma that they went through.”