U.S. Police Dogs Originated from Slavery—and Must Be Abolished

The Thirteenth Amendment bans all “badges and incidents” of slavery. But using police dogs enacts cruelty on each folks of shade and the dogs themselves. To totally rid society of slavery, the dogs should be retired.

The Thirteenth Amendment presupposed to abolish chattel slavery, together with what an 1883 Supreme Court resolution referred to as its “badges and incidents.” But the modification left some infamous carve-outs: Namely, it stays authorized to enslave individuals who have been convicted of against the law. But there’s one other remaining “badge and incident” of slavery that we should uproot: the police’s use of K9 items. The police’s follow of utilizing dogs to attack human beings derives from enslavers’ follow of utilizing slave hounds to attack enslaved folks. This coercive historical past harms human beings and animals to be able to perpetuate the racial and financial pursuits of individuals in energy. One method we are able to honor the Thirteenth Amendment’s promise to rid our society of slavery—all of its badges and incidents—is by getting dogs out of policing.

State-sanctioned canine assaults–like these carried out by trendy police canine items–had been widespread in chattel slavery. Legal scholar Madalyn Wasilczuk speaks of how white enslavers “conceived of an enslaved person’s attempt to obtain freedom as a type of high-value property theft, appropriately recaptured with brute force.” The use of canine assaults to protect enslavers’ financial pursuits was authorized, and thus not a uncommon act dedicated by a couple of bigots. Wasilczuk explains that the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 federally legalized slave patrols’ capacity to grab slaves in free states, usually accompanied by looking dogs—and the act was later nicknamed “the Bloodhound Bill” because of this. Legal scholar Michael Swistara stresses that these canine assaults had been deliberately grotesque. Swistara explains how, as early because the 1700s, data present enslavers “bred Cuban bloodhounds with the explicit purpose of raising them to enact violence against Black people” and “the scars of dog bites were so common that they” had been bodily badges of slavery, turning into “marks used to identify [Black] escapees in advertisements for rewards.”

In addition to the violence these dogs inflicted, the dogs themselves had been additionally compelled, nonconsenting companions. Swistara appropriately argues that police dogs had been and nonetheless are themselves subjugated underneath the carceral state as disposable weapons used to perpetuate racial and financial inequality. Slaveholders needed to intentionally break the bond between people and dogs, humanity’s greatest good friend. To conscript dogs into Black folks’s racial subjugation and make the animals really feel animosity in direction of Black folks, “enslavers trained dogs by forcing enslaved people to beat the dogs[…]while others arranged planned chases or commanded dogs to attack enslaved people who had been forced to secure themselves to trees.”

Furthering this divide, slaveholders would feed their dogs wealthy diets of meat whereas denying the same to enslaved people. The establishment of slavery was so determined to suppress any bonds between enslaved folks and dogs that these states even made it unlawful for enslaved folks to have dogs, claiming canine possession constituted weapon possession. Despite the truth that dogs needed to be skilled to acknowledge and attack Blackness as they may not detect inherent racial variations, many “white Southerners, including Thomas Jefferson, believed that Black people smelled, looked, felt, and tasted different such that their dogs could detect differences between races imperceptible to humans but objectively present.” As Wasilczuk aptly summarizes, finally, “in treating dogs’ perceptions of their handlers’ prejudices as innate, white Southerners employed their animals in the project of race- making and racialized subordination.” Dogs thereby turned forced partners to state violence.

This compelled collaboration with slave hounds developed into modern-day police K9 items. After the abolition of chattel slavery, Wasilczuk emphasizes that the state-sanctioned use of dogs to attack human beings didn’t grow to be widespread once more until the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Some of probably the most recognizable iconography of the Civil Rights Movement contains photos and movies of police directing German Shepherds to attack Black people—many of whom were children. Just as Black runaways from slavery threatened an unfair financial system, Black civil rights protestors who skilled police canine assaults threatened the unfair Jim Crow economic system.

The historic sample of the state forcing animals to attack human beings for cruelty and revenue continues at present. According to a public data request, Houston Police Department officers reported siccing dogs onto 104 folks within the 14 months between March 2022 and May 2023. At least 77 of the 104 folks attacked by this single police division’s K9 unit had been both charged with nonviolent offenses or nothing in any respect. A 2019 study that examined greater than 32,000 emergency room visits attributable to police canine assaults between 2005 and 2013 discovered that 42 % of the victims had been Black.

Additionally, the prison industrial complex—the net of firms that make money from policing, incarceration, and enslaving prisoners—features a community of businesses that revenue from folks captured by police dogs who’re then compelled to work for pennies or no money in any respect.

Modern-day regulation enforcement subjects police dogs to cruel and coercive training utilizing prong collars, choke chains, and ache compliance. These strategies reinforce aggression by subjecting the dogs to ache with the promise the struggling will finish in the event that they chunk somebody. In a rustic that claims to like its dogs, police dogs are used as weapons, sacrificed in conditions the place they are often killed, left to die in sizzling patrol vehicles, and—in the event that they survive their compelled “service”—auctioned off per their property standing. Though police dogs have “officer” standing, this farcical designation doesn’t acquire the dogs’ consent to “work” as law enforcement officials or danger their lives. Despite having prohibitions towards animal cruelty, these legal guidelines don’t change the truth that these dogs (and all animals) are nonetheless legally “property” who’re used and abused to serve the financial and racial pursuits of individuals in energy.

And, opposite to public perception, dogs are usually not a “necessary” element of regulation enforcement. Police canines are literally not superb at what they do—research have proven that drug-sniffing dogs often produce false positivesparticularly when looking open air or inside automobiles. Once law enforcement officials sic a canine on a human being, the dogs all too usually do not respond to commands to stop biting, and as a substitute mauling folks for minutes on finish and tearing flesh once pulled away. Studies present that police canine bites are more serious than standard dog bites and more often result in hospitalization. While slave hounds had been overwhelmed into seeing Black folks as threats, today’s dogs reflect the racist biases of their police handlers: In a 2011 investigation, the Chicago Tribune discovered that, in a three-year stretch, Chicago Police Department dogs failed to search out medicine 73 percent of the time after they searched Latino drivers after a drug-sniffing canine alerted.

Well-funded propaganda campaigns starring cute police dog mascotsthe Paw Patrol, and RoboDogs obscure the violent, coercive, and anti-Black reality in regards to the follow of utilizing dogs to attack human beings. It makes it tough for attorneys to uphold the Thirteenth Amendment’s promise.

In order to efficiently file a lawsuit over a given follow underneath the Thirteenth Amendment, Congress should first declare the process a “badge and incident” of slavery. Congress has labeled “racially motivated violence” as a badge and incident of slavery, giving attorneys and students the chance to focus on the racialized violence of state-sanctioned canine assaults. When Civil Rights Corps sued the Harris County Constable’s Office in February of 2023 for siccing a canine on a Black man whereas he laid on the bottom together with his arms outstretched, lawyer Shirley LaVarco was in a position to clarify ties to the historic use of slave hounds within the South.

Abolishing the badges and incidents of chattel slavery means refusing to power human beings and animals to perpetuate the racial and financial pursuits of individuals in energy. If we need to uphold the Thirteenth Amendment and every little thing it stands for, getting dogs out of policing is a crucial place to begin.

Build Ahmad is a former state and federal public defender, and at present senior lawyer with Civil Rights Corps. In her skilled and political work, she focuses on abolition, the prison system, animal liberation and worldwide human rights. She is the writer of “Criminal Defense for Political Activists: A Lawyer’s Solidarity with the Movement,” and an article titled “The Professionalized Violence of Prosecutorial Power and Misconduct,” which will probably be printed within the CUNY Law Review in 2024.

Kiah Duggins is an lawyer at Civil Rights Corps who litigates alongside actions towards police abuse and pretrial detention nationwide. Her writing about jail industrial complicated abolition and worldwide human rights could be discovered within the Harvard Civil Rights Civil Liberties Law Review.