Minneapolis Police Department Created More Aggregate Demand for Dog Breeders

From my understanding there is a bit of a rivalry between the Minneapolis and St. Paul police departments. Not wanting his department to be outdone by the St. Paul department in creating aggregate demand for dog breeders a brave soldier of the Minneapolis department stepped up to the plate and executed a family pet:

In the alley, Tito — a nearly two-year-old, 120-pound Cane Corso — approached an officer who was still hunting for the car theft suspect. The officer ended up opening fire and killing Trott and Lyczkowski’s beloved dog.

“I ran out the door and was hollering for him,” Trott tells us. “I didn’t get halfway to the gate when you could hear the officer yell, ‘Stop!’ He just yelled ‘Stop!’ and shot him and that was it.”

St. Paul is still in the lead but I’m sure another fine soldier of the Minneapolis Police Department will find a litter of puppies to execute, which would put his department ahead of St. Paul’s.

Not surprisingly the officer was quick to jump on the “You weren’t here, man. You don’t know what went down!” justification:

“The only thing [cops] kept saying is, ‘You weren’t here, you don’t know what’s going on, you don’t have time to discern pet from animal and in our mind they’re just animals,'” Trott says. “It was, shoot first, think later. You know, I understand where they’re at — I worked four years for the Illinois Department of Corrections as a correctional officer. But [Tito] had a collar, tags, and he’s clearly not a stray.”

This has become the police officers’ equivalent to the Obama supporters’ race card. And like that race card this “You weren’t there, man!” card has worn thin. The officer apparently said that he didn’t have time to discern pet from animal but if you’re using a firearm you better be 100 percent sure of your fucking target. Shooting a dog or person because you didn’t have time to discern the situation is not an acceptable excuse. If needing to identify targets before deploying lethal force is too rigorous for you then you shouldn’t be a police officer.

Whenever I mention these strange views I hold somebody invariably falls back to the polices’ other favorite excuse, officer safety. They claim that officers have to be given considerably leeway in these matters because “They’re putting their life on the line to save ours!” I’m sorry but that’s a bullshit excuse as well. Most of an officer’s time is spent extorting the citizenry by issuing speeding tickets and parking violations, arresting people participating an mutually agreed to transactions that the state has declared prohibited, and kidnapping people who have failed to give the state a cut of the action. The lives saved by police officers seems to more and more be a happy accident than purposeful action, which makes sense since saving lives seldom results in more funding for a department. Maybe if today’s police spent most of their time saving lives I’d be willing to cut them a bit of slack but they don’t so I’m not.

Hopefully our society will eventually stop shielding police officers from the consequences of bad actions. Until then aggregate demand for dog breeders will continue to increase.