Racism in police dog attacks is an old story

Broward’s K-9 cops might try siccing their snarling mutts on math majors. Not sure how else they could negate the damning implications of their dog-bite stats. The Sun Sentinel examined records of police dog attacks from Broward County’s six largest police agencies and the racial disparities were stark. In a 17-month span, beginning in January 2019, 73% of the people chased down by police dogs were Black. Even more disturbing, 84% of the suspects mauled by the dogs were Black.

The race factor seems wildly disproportionate in a county with a 30% Black population. Half the people arrested in Broward over that period were Black, but that still doesn’t jibe with the racial breakdown of folks subjected to K-9 justice.

The Sun-Sentinel’s Brittany Wallman, Mario Ariza and Megan O’Matz based their findings on arrest records from the Broward Sheriff ’s Office and police departments in Fort Lauderdale, Hollywood, Coral Springs, Pembroke Pines and Miramar. It was a shocking report that didn’t much shock. We’ve seen this before.

Thirty years ago, the Sun Sentinel examined 445 K-9 bite cases reported by Broward police agencies between 1988 and 1990. Reporters Dana Banker (lately, our managing editor) and Joanne Cavanaugh found that county cops were “quick to unleash their dogs on suspects, injuring a disproportionate number of blacks, petty offenders, nonviolent juveniles and even some bystanders.”

In the 1991 investigation, the Sun Sentinel found “one in five people bitten was age 17 or younger.”

In the 2021 report, the Sun Sentinel found that “one in five people bitten were 17 or younger, despite policies that discourage police officers from unleashing K-9s on children.”

In 1991, “About two-thirds of the people bitten were unarmed or suspected of nonviolent crimes.”

In 2021, “two-thirds of the people bitten were accused of nonviolent crimes.”

Racial disparities in police dog attacks might be dismissed as an aberration, attributable to the “complex socio-economic factors” that afflict poor communities. Except uneven police actions have surfaced in other categories. In 2013, the Broward Public Defender’s Office examined 458 bike citations issued during the previous three years by Fort Lauderdale police and found that 396 of the bicyclists were Black.

Most were cited for riding an unregistered bike. As a longtime bicyclist and a longtime resident of Fort Lauderdale, I was shocked to discover that there was even such a crime as biking without a city-issued license.

No worries, former Public Defender Howard Finkelstein assured me this week. Not for the likes of me. Bike ordinances weren’t enforced on my side of town.

Finkelstein’s office found that 98% of the police stops for biking misdemeanors most of us white folks didn’t know existed occurred in Black neighborhoods west of Federal Highway. The stop-and-hassle “pretext arrests” allowed police without the bother of probable cause to search bikers for contraband.

He called the purported offenses “biking while Black.” Since then, similar “biking while Black” police strategies have been exposed in Tampa, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Oakland, New Orleans and New Jersey.

Finkelstein’s office also looked at “walking while black,” finding that more than 90% of Fort Lauderdale’s citations issued for jaywalking or failure to walk on sidewalks had been issued in predominately Black zip codes.

“We also looked at dog bites [in 2013].” Finkelstein recalled that the cop canines were sent after suspects “almost exclusively” in the Black side of town. He suspected that K-9 officers were more circumspect in Broward’s more prosperous neighborhoods, where an unleashed and unpredictable police dog might bite the wrong person and set off some pricy litigation.

In a similar finding, a 2016 ACLU investigation discovered that Black motorists in Florida were twice as likely to be stopped for seat belt violations than whites.

“In the year 2021, anybody who doesn’t recognize that law enforcement acts differently toward Blacks is either living under a rock or is willfully blind,” Finkelstein said.

Over the last few years, most of the outrage over inequitable law enforcement tactics concerns racial disparities in police shootings. But the schism between law enforcement and Black residents starts with petty neighborhood stuff. And with dog attacks.

After the 1991 revelations in the Sun Sentinel, Broward police agencies promised that tough new regulations would stop K-9 abuses. Florida ACLU Director Jim Green (now in private practice in West Palm Beach) was skeptical. “A lot of times when bureaucracies are under siege or attack, they’ll make some minor changes in their policies and call them major improvements,” Green warned. “It’s an absolute snow job.”

Three doggone decades later, it still is.

Fred Grimm