Underdogs and Overlords

We're not worthy: Georgia police dog "Tanja" is buried with full honors.

A little less than a year ago, Michael Vickers shot and seriously wounded a 10-year-old boy in Broxton, Georgia under circumstances that remain unclear. The victim, Dakota Corbitt, suffered serious and potentially permanent injury to his leg.

Despite the fact that this was an act of firearms-related violence involving a child, no charges were filed against Vickers. Although the public record is barren of a comment from Coffee County Sheriff Doyle Wooten expressing sympathy for Dakota and his mother, Amy, the sheriff pointedly commiserated with the shooter, telling a local NBC affiliate that Vickers is the father of three young children and that the shooting “is really preying on his mind.”

Many people bearing such burdens would make a point of meeting with the injured child and expressing contrition in person. Vickers didn't have time for such a gesture, however, because immediately after the shooting he went on what was described as a “pre-approved vacation” from his job as a drug investigator with the Broxton Police Department.

At the time of the shooting, Vickers was in pursuit of a man suspected of shooting a police officer from nearby Douglas, Georgia. However, Vickers didn't fire the shot at a human suspect; he was attempting to shoot the Corbitt family's dog. Owing to his good-enough-for-government-“work” marksmanship, Vickers nearly murdered the 10-year-old boy.

Every day in this country, police officers, acting on the basis of vague and usually implausible fears, shoot and kill dogs. This isn't true of service personnel whose occupations actually benefit the public -- such as postal carriers and private couriers – and involve frequent contact with unfamiliar canines. In some cases, the shooting or destruction of a family pet by a privileged aggressor has been compounded by the threat – or imposition – of charges against the grieving human victims.

The memory of man runs not to an occasion on which an armed emissary of the wealth-devouring class has been prosecuted for killing or injuring a privately owned canine. A member of the productive class who kills, wounds, taunts, or even barks at a K-9 “officer,” on the other hand, will face criminal charges, even if the act was committed in demonstrable self-defense. Under a bill approved by the Georgia state senate last week, a Mundane who “assaults” a police dog could face up to ten years in prison and a $10,000 fine.

...unless he was a fellow LEO, of course.

Senate Bill 72, “Tanja's Law,” is dedicated to the memory of a police dog that was shot and killed during a SWAT raid in Georgia that took place just a few weeks after Vickers nearly killed Dakota Corbitt. Tanja was buried with the Brezhnevite pageantry and state-dictated solemnity that accompany every police funeral.

Late last year, the man who shot Tanja, a genuinely unpleasant specimen named Steven Lee Waldemer, accepted a plea agreement imposing a 20-50 year prison sentence. This was seen as inadequate by Tanja's human comrades, who insisted that any Mundane who lifts an unhallowed hand to injure one of his canine overlords must suffer more severely than the present law dictates.

In its original draft, “Tanja's law” would have treated the killing of a police dog as an act of second-degree murder – the charge that would have been filed against Vickers if he had killed Dakota Corbitt and had done so as a common citizen, rather than a state-licensed purveyor of violence.

If enacted in its original form, “Tanja's Law” would have been the first statute in U.S. history – perhaps in the history of the Western World – to recognize the deliberate destruction of a non-human creature as “murder.”

Of course, this would have applied only to specially designated members of that species, whose codified status in law would have been superior to that of human beings who are not part of the exalted fraternity of official coercion. A dog killed by a police officer wouldn't be regarded as a murder victim, or autopsied by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, as “Tanja's Law” specifies. Nor would a human Mundane be allowed to use defensive violence to protect himself against an unwarranted K-9 attack.

Herein lies the unarticulated, but undeniable, evil of this bill: In its original form, it would have expanded the circumstances in which police would employ “justifiable” lethal force. Under the Graham v. Connor standard, the individual police officer is trained that lethal force is “reasonable” in response to a perceived threat to his life or that of a fellow officer. If killing a police dog is “murder,” a human officer on the scene would be legally justified in killing a Mundane who is “perceived” as posing such a threat.

Currently, it is common to see police officers gun down dogs that simply approach them. Indeed, that's how Dakota Corbitt was shot: The family dog raced into the family's front yard in response to the presence of an armed intruder. One entirely plausible scenario growing out of “Tanja's Law” version 1.0 would see a police officer gunning down a human being who verbally “threatens” or “takes an aggressive stance” when approached by a police dog.

The legislative purpose of the original bill was “to provide a measure of equivalency in the punishment of crimes committed against police dogs in the performance of their official duties as to that of peace officers [and to] provide that the offense of murder in the second degree shall include causing the death of a police dog while such police dog is engaged in its official duties....” 

 

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