The racist history of police dog use

My July 27 tweets have caused quite a kerfuffle online, so much so that The Hill Times is fielding complaints with Wonder Woman’s Bracelets of Submission. The tweets in question are: "All this FOR A DOG?", followed by "Fuck Bingo. Guess he ran out of luck." I said what I said, so let’s talk about it. On July 27, the Toronto Police Service (TPS) held a funeral procession “to honour a fallen K9 who was killed in the line of duty earlier this week,” as reported by Global News. I questioned why TPS was allocating resources to such a spectacle, given that Toronto is facing financial crisis. I questioned why resources were used for this pageantry when refugees have been sleeping on the streets in a city that cited the need for $160-million to house them. And why the same people who launched the violent removal of the unhoused at Lamport grounds during the pandemic would exercise more humanity towards a dog—especially given that exercise cost the city $2-million. Law professor Gregory S. Parks perfectly captured the reasoning behind my tweets in his paper in the University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class: “The idea that Whites, on average, show more compassion toward dogs than Blacks is a narrative that is not unfamiliar among Blacks.” My mentions are all the proof I need to confirm my suspicion. And this is not new. The use of dogs in official law enforcement capacities originated in Ghent, Belgium, in 1899; in the Americas, dogs were used as far back as the 16th century to “attack and intimidate Indigenous populations and to prevent slaves—mostly Black Africans—from fleeing,” as Vice News explained. In the paper, “Slave Hounds and Abolition in the Americas,” from the Oxford Academic Journal, Past and Present, Tyler Parry and Charlton Yingling explain why the use of dogs was so effective in controlling the movement of enslaved Black populations: “the dog was perhaps a more effective tool for managing labour or even inflicting horrific pain or death on those who defied their masters’ commands.” Black Canadian historian and Dalhousie University professor Dr. Afua Cooper remarked on the continuation of that role during a presentation to the charity, Canada’s History, that in Canada, “police dogs been used on us…those big German Shepherd dogs, that used to track slaves during the period slavery. Today, in 2022-2023, those dogs are used on us.” The Sask Dispatch reported that within Saskatchewan, “instances of police violence against Indigenous and Black people are frequent, but often don’t make the news.” Since the creation of law enforcement derived from slave patrols and violently removing Indigenous people from their lands, the use of dogs became cemented in police culture to control these populations. As a Black woman, my indifference towards the death of a police dog is warranted, especially given that Black people are more likely to be targets of their viciousness. The Ontario Human Rights Commission released a report on the TPS’s disproportionate use of police dogs on Black Torontonians: ”Although they represent only 8.8 of Toronto’s population, Black people represented … 57.1 of cases involving a police dog.” According to reporting in The Toronto Star, Black people are “more than six times more likely to be taken down by a police dog.” Seems like not much has changed. While insulted by my tweets, neither those who wrote The Hill Times, nor those who polluted my mentions, expressed equal disappointment or concern at the refusal of Winnipeg Police to search the Prairie Green Landfill for the remains of two Indigenous women, Morgan Harris and Marcedes Myran. They were assumed murdered between March and May 2022 by a suspected serial killer who the CBC reported had posted white supremacist material on social media. The lack of political will and societal outrage is palpable, yet I am being “disrespectful” to the remains of a police dog that was treated to more compassion than was reserved for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. There is a pecking order in this country, and what is clear is that dogs deserve more humanity and compassion than Black and Indigenous “undesirables,” according to a white majority. Erica Ifill is a co-host of the Bad+Bitchy podcast. The Hill Times