Bill banning police dogs in arrests and crowd control gets next test

A proposal to outlaw a horrific symbol of the Civil Rights Movement continues to make steady progress through the Assembly.

Assembly Bill 742 by Assemblyman Dr. Corey Jackson, D-Riverside, would outlaw the use of police dogs for arrests or crowd control. The bill, which would not ban the use of police K-9s for search and rescue or narcotics or explosive detection, is explicitly intended to address law enforcement’s long-standing use of dogs on people of color.

Section 1 of the bill states, “The use of police canines has been a mainstay in this country’s dehumanizing, cruel, and violent abuse of Black Americans and people of color for centuries. First used by slave catchers, police canines are a violent carry-over from America’s dark past. In recent decades, they have been used in brutal attempts to quell the Civil Rights Movement, the LA Race Riots, and in response to Black Lives Matter protests. The use of police canines make people fear and further distrust the police, resulting in less safety and security for all, especially for communities of color.”

Said Jackson in a press release: “The use of police canines has inflicted brutal violence and lifelong trauma on Black Americans and communities of color. This bill marks a turning point in the fight to end this cruel and inhumane practice and build trust between the police and the communities they serve.”

Introduced on February 13, AB 742 passed out of its first committee, Assembly Public Safety, on March 21, on a party-line, 6-2 vote. The committee’s bill analysis noted that data collected by the federal Department of Justice’s Criminal Justice Statistics Center found that the employment of police dogs in “use of force” incidents resulted in serious bodily injury or death 76 times in 2020. That equaled 10.2 percent of total use of force incidents by law enforcement that year.

AB 742 is now awaiting action in the Assembly Appropriations Committee. A hearing is scheduled for April 24.

The bill enjoys widespread support from civil rights groups like the ACLU, the California Alliance for Youth and Community Justice and the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights.

It’s opposed by a long list of law enforcement organizations, including the California Peace Officers Association, the California Fraternal Order of Police and the California Police Chiefs Association, which view police dogs as a fundamental tool in policing and critical resource for protecting the public.

“AB 742 would eliminate the use of a less lethal force option that has proven to save lives,” the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department said in a statement reprinted in the Assembly Public Safety Committee bill analysis. “It would lessen the chance that a dangerous offender might be taken in safely and would deny yet another measure of personal protection from the men and women who have sworn to uphold the laws of this state.”

The bill….is explicitly intended to address law enforcement’s long-standing use of dogs on people of color.

Attorney Carmen-Nicole Cox, the director of  government affairs of ACLU California Action, the bill’s sponsor, vehemently disagreed, saying weaponized police dogs are one of the “prevalent, visible vestiges of the original sin of slavery,” meant to intimidate communities of color, a symbol to remind them of their place in society. She said that as a woman of color herself just talking about them makes her “a little bit emotional.”

But Cox said AB 742 is about more than just optics. She said police K-9s specifically trained to bite “fit the description of deadly force,” but that police “don’t actually have the ability to control the severity of the use of force.”

The result, Cox said, has been numerous cases of mauling by police dogs that have caused serious, permanent injuries to Californians – and, in some cases, led to million-dollar payouts by California governments.

Cox said there’s no need for police dogs to be trained to bite or to be used in arrest or crowd control, under any circumstances. She said most police agencies don’t use dogs for any sort of law enforcement function and the agencies in California that don’t use them seem to get along just fine without them.

For instance, she said, California police agencies that don’t employ dogs don’t have higher rates of officer injuries. So she flat out doesn’t believe the argument that police K-9s could play a role in barricade situations as Sacramento County Sheriff Jim Cooper recently suggested in a tweet.

“My deputies faced a dangerous barricaded suspect that fired over 20 rounds toward them, but our K9 unit took him into custody WITHOUT shooting or any loss of life,” Cooper tweeted on March 31. “AB 742 bans the use of K9s & makes it more dangerous for cops to do their jobs and makes the public less safe.”

Cooper, himself a person of color, disputed the premise of Cox’s argument, that police dogs constitute deadly force and are uncontrollable. He said police K-9 handlers are skilled at calling their dogs off when necessary. Furthermore, he said law enforcement generally hasn’t used police dogs for crowd control for years.

And while he also acknowledged that there are certainly police forces in California that don’t employ dogs, Cooper said those agencies often contact agencies with dogs – like the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office – when they need help with incidents like the barricade situation he described on Twitter.

Cooper said police dogs are like police helicopters – some agencies have them, some don’t, and those that don’t frequently turn to the ones that do for help. The Sacramento County Sheriff currently has 10 police dogs on its force, but it’s authorized to have as many as 12.

“To me, the ACLU is overly dramatic,” Cooper said when asked about the arguments in favor of the bill. The sheriff said if AB 742 is passed, he fears, we “could see the use of deadly force increasing” because California police agencies will have lost a critical, non-lethal tool from their toolbox.

Brian Joseph is a former statehouse reporter for the Sacramento Bee and Orange County Register