The Marshall Project: We Investigated How Police Use Dogs as Weapons. Here’s How You Can Do It Too.

We investigated how police use dogs as weapons. Here’s how you can do it too. in The Marshall Project. New York, 2020 (accessed December 29, 2020).

But the use of dogs varied widely among the police departments for which we got data through public records requests; cities like Chicago and San Francisco reported only one bite each, while in Indianapolis police dogs bit someone every five days.

As for how to prove it, that takes a commitment to collecting and crunching data, gathering cases and interviewing a lot of people. One place to start looking is the database we compiled of serious incidents, which is searchable by state.

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Reviewing underlying documents can be the most time-consuming part of the process. We collected incident reports, affidavits, arrest reports and, when possible, video footage for the cases we examined. What agencies must disclose through public records requests varies a lot by state; Arizona requires law enforcement to release a lot, Alabama in practice allows agencies to keep information under wraps. For departments with a lot of bites, reviewing and organizing the documents can be daunting; Ryan Martin of IndyStar and Dana Brozost-Kelleher of the Invisible Institute spent almost a year digging into records from the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department.

You can read the full article here: https://www.themarshallproject.org/2020/12/23/we-investigated-how-police-use-dogs-as-weapons-here-s-how-you-can-do-it-too