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Police Can Shoot Your Dog For ‘Moving Or Barking’, Court Rules

Police are allowed to shoot and kill your dog if it moves “a few inches” or barks at them, a ruling from the 6th Circuit Court has decreed. Mark and Cheryl Brown petitioned the appeals court to hold the city and police officers from Battle Creek, Mich., accountable for shooting and killing their dogs while executing a search warrant of their home looking for evidence of drugs. One of the Brown’s dogs was shot for “moving a few inches” and the second for “just standing there, barking, turned sideways to the officers.” “The standard we set out today is that a police officer’s use of deadly force against a dog while executing a warrant to search a home for illegal drug activity is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment when, given the totality of the circumstances and viewed from the perspective of an objectively reasonable officer, the dog poses an imminent threat to the officer’s safety,” Judge Eric Clay wrote in the court’s opinion. Washington Examiner reports: In the case of the Browns’ two pit bulls, the imminent threat came from the dogs barking and moving around. One officer shot the first pit bull after he said it “had only moved [...]

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