Cops have long partnered with dogs, claiming they help keep officers safe. But a study published in January suggests that police do just as well without canine colleagues.
In 2020, Salt Lake City suspended the use of police K9 units after The Salt Lake Tribune published body camera footage of an officer ordering his dog to bite a 36-year-old black man who was on his knees with his hands in the air. That abrupt policy shift gave researchers at the University of South Carolina, the University of Utah, and Clemson University a chance to test claims about the benefits of police dogs.
Police say dogs help find hidden suspects, deter resistance, protect officers, intimidate potentially violent crowds, and improve public relations. But the researchers, who reported their findings in the Journal of Experimental Criminology, found that the “sudden suspension of K9 apprehension was not associated with a statistical increase in officer or suspect injury, or suspect resistance, during felony arrests.” The authors concluded that restricting or eliminating police K9s is “unlikely to impact aggregate officer or suspect safety negatively.”
Those results contradict widely accepted assumptions. “There is a great conviction within the law enforcement K9 community that these programs provide more effective policing by increasing officer safety, reducing suspect injury, and deterring suspect resistance,” the researchers wrote. “We were not able to detect any such effect on any measure.”
There is ample evidence, however, of what happens when police dogs are misused. In a March report on constitutional violations by police in Louisville, Kentucky, the U.S. Justice Department described several incidents in which officers sicced dogs on compliant or nonthreatening suspects. In one case, an officer searching for a home invasion suspect discovered a 14-year-old boy lying face down on the ground and immediately “deployed his dog off-leash” without “giving any warning.” The officer “ordered the dog to bite the teen at least seven times,” inflicting “serious injuries on his arm and back.”
Hellbound and Down 