Federal judge: Unlicensed dogs are “contraband”, can be killed by police without issue

Last year, Detroit police raided a woman’s home in a marijuana bust and shot and killed her three dogs. (The killings were, of course, deemed justified.) The woman sued the police department, claiming her dogs’ shooting violated her Fourth Amendment rights. And now the verdict is in:

A federal judge ruled Wednesday that a Michigan woman has no basis to sue the Detroit Police Department (DPD) for shooting her three dogs because they were not properly licensed.

U.S. District Court Judge George Caram Steeh dismissed a federal civil rights lawsuit filed by Detroit resident Nikita Smith last last year after a marijuana raid by Detroit police left her three dogs shot to death.

[…] Federal courts have established that pets are protected from unreasonable seizures (read: killing) by police, but the city of Detroit argued in a motion in March that Smith's dogs, because they were unlicensed, were "contraband" for the purposes of the Fourth Amendment, meaning she had no legitimate property interest in them and therefore no basis to sue the officers or department.

In his Wednesday opinion Steeh agreed.

"The Court is aware that this conclusion may not sit well with dog owners and animal lovers in general," the judge wrote. "The reason for any unease stems from the fact that while pet owners consider their pets to be family members, the law considers pets to be property."

The reasoning is that because the law states that all dogs must be licensed by their owners, unlicensed dogs don’t count as legitimate property and are thus ineligible for Fourth Amendment protections, thus rendering them the same as contraband. Which means that people like Smith therefore have little recourse for compensation when their pets end up dead after a visit from the police.

The DPD has a particularly abysmal track record with dog encounters. The court opinion notes that the officers conducting the raid hadn’t received any particular training on how to deal with animals, and that department officials declared the killings were all justified without even speaking to the officers involved. In fact, the Reason article reveals that an investigation into the department’s handling of dog shootings couldn’t find a single instance where such a shooting wasn’t deemed justified.

Further, several officers involved in the Smith raid have grim legacies of their own: Two of them had shot around twenty dogs each, and one officer has killed as many as 73 dogs – an increase of 34 in one year alone.

Sounds like more than a few bad or careless apples to me.

A final note: The drug raid that started it all? It netted 25 grams of pot, saddling Smith with a misdemeanor. Which was then dismissed when the cops didn’t bother to show up in court.

So at least her dogs died for absolutely nothing.

(via @radleybalko; thanks to Lan for the input)