It took two Suffolk County police officers to pull off a police dog that had jumped on the back of a dark-skinned bystander at a funeral procession in New York, bit into his shirt, and wouldn’t let go.
On July 31, dozens of police vehicles, including several K-9 patrol vans, were participating in a funeral procession in the Parkchester neighborhood of the Bronx, New York, for Officer Didarul Islam, who was slain in the horrific mass shooting in Midtown Manhattan earlier that week. Thousands of mourners came out to pay their respects.
But at some point along the route, the procession stopped, and a trained police dog suddenly escaped from the Long Island police agency’s SUV. In a concerning video posted on Threads, you can see the K-9 running past cars, around a tree, and straight to a dark-skinned man who was watching the action at a distance from the sidewalk.
The video has resurrected long-held suspicions that police dogs have been trained to attack and terrorize African Americans and other people of color.
According to a year-long investigation by The Marshall Project, most bite victims of police dogs are men, and studies suggest that they are disproportionately Black in certain areas. One nationwide study showed that between 2005 and 2013, nearly all of the people who ended up in the emergency room from a police dog bite were Black…