‘Atrocious’ law banning police dogs from arresting ’empowers’ criminals, says sheriff

A California sheriff has criticized lawmakers who want police dogs not to bite suspected criminals or be used during confrontations, calling K-9s a “less-than-lethal” option for law enforcement.

Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco told Fox News, “One of our biggest successes and biggest tools to defuse situations is the deployment of canines.

Bray K-9 Officer Matt Wendling prepares to give a command to Kilo, a Belgian Malinois, during a K-9 parade during the National Night Out Tuesday, Aug. 2, 2022, in downtown Bray. (Leonard Ortiz/Register Media News Group/Orange County via Getty Images)

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AB 742 prohibits the police Rather than using dogs to catch a suspect or to control crowds. Police dogs are not allowed to bite people under any circumstances, according to the text of the bill. The bill would not prohibit the use of bomb or drug-sniffing search and rescue dogs or police K-9s.

“The use of police dogs is at the heart of this country’s centuries of inhumane, brutal and violent abuse against black Americans and people of color,” he said, referring to police dogs being used by slave hunters and more recently to quell riots such as the Los Angeles race riots. Black Lives Matter protests.

Statistics from California Department of Justice In 2020 or 2021, they will not show forced harm involving police dogs during civil disorder or assembly.

Restricting K-9S ‘hides’ criminals, says sheriff

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“Every agency should have canine dogs,” Bianco said, adding that very few canine deployments result in bites and “those deployments are all to aggressive people.”

There are few national statistics about K-9 use or injuries related to police dogs. A study Between 2005 and 2013, police dog bites sent nearly 33,000 people to U.S. hospitals.

in CaliforniaIn the year Police dogs accounted for nearly 14% of all use-of-force incidents that resulted in injury in 2021, according to the state DOJ. K-9 use is largely unregulated in California—individual police departments can set their own policies, and Training instructions Those published ten years ago are optional.

California AB 742 prohibits police from using dogs to bite suspects or to make arrests or crowd control. (iStock)

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But Bianco described lawmakers with the “terrible law” as “trying to take away a non-physical weapon of force” from police.

“It’s just to make the criminals more daring and fight with us,” he said.

To hear more from Bianco, Click here.

Ramiro Vargas contributed the following video.