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Kansas legislators are transferring to impose more durable jail sentences for harming or killing police dogs, and the measure has bipartisan assist regardless of questions elsewhere over how the animals are utilized in regulation enforcement.
The state House anticipated to take a last vote Wednesday on a invoice that might enable judges to condemn first-time offenders to 5 years in jail for killing a police, arson, recreation warden or search and rescue canine, or a police horse, and mandate a tremendous of at the very least $10,000. Killing the dogs already is a felony in Kansas, however the most jail sentence is one yr; the utmost tremendous is $5,000, and the regulation doesn’t particularly cowl horses.
Approval by the Republican-controlled House would ship the measure to the GOP-led Senate. When the House took a preliminary voice vote Tuesday after a brief debate, just a few members voted no.
The measure is a response to the demise in November of Bane, an 8-year-old canine utilized by the Sedgwick County sheriff in Wichita, the state’s largest metropolis. Authorities say a suspect in a home violence case took refuge in a storm drain and strangled Bane when a deputy despatched the canine in to flush out the suspect.
“These animals are not only tools. They are considered family,” stated Rep. Adam Turk, a Kansas City-area Republican. “These animals are of great import to the protection and security of our citizens.”
The invoice is sponsored by two distinguished Republicans, House Speaker Dan Hawkins and Rep. Stephen Owens, chair of the House Corrections and Juvenile Justice Committee. But it additionally has the backing of Rep. John Carmichael, the committee’s high Democrat. Hawkins and Carmichael are from Wichita.
The federal authorities and a few states already enable longer jail sentences than Kansas. Under a 2000 federal regulation, a person who kills a police canine will be sentenced to as much as 10 years in jail. In 2019, the doable penalty in Florida elevated from as much as 5 years in jail to as much as 15 years. Tennessee elevated its penalties in 2022, and Kentucky did so final yr.
But accidents brought on by police dogs even have made headlines.
In rural Ohio in July 2023, a police canine bit a Black truck driver severely sufficient that he wanted hospital remedy after the person was on his knees along with his fingers within the air.
The Salt Lake City police division suspended its canine apprehension program in 2020 after a Black man was bitten and an audit discovered 27 canine chew instances throughout the earlier two years. And the identical yr, a Black man in Lafayette, Indiana, was placed in a medically induced coma after police dogs mauled him as he was arrested in a battery case.
During Tuesday’s debate within the Kansas House, Democratic Rep. Ford Carr, of Wichita, one among six Black members, talked about the Ohio case and recalled how throughout the Civil Rights Movement, authorities turned dogs on peaceable Black protesters.
Carr additionally urged the Wichita suspect was defending himself.
“I don’t think that there’s any one of us here who would sit idly by and let an animal maul you without fighting back,” Carr said.
Carmichael, who is white, acknowledged the fraught history surrounding police dogs, but he urged Carr to review testimony during the House committee’s hearing on the bill earlier this month. Four law enforcement officers backed the measure, and no one spoke against it.
Bane’s handler, Sedgwick County Deputy Tyler Brooks, told the committee that Bane became important to his family.
“It’s kind of funny to me that this very large dog who frequently broke things and knocked everything over during a training session would be the one that would be the one that would break my 7-year-old autistic son of his crippling fear of dogs,” Brooks informed the committee.
