Malone had just taken in the children from outside where they had been playing while celebrating the birthday of her five-year-old son. Inside the birthday cake and ice cream hadn’t even been served when they heard the bang from outside.

That bang was the sound of a Wynnewood police officer shooting the family dog. Opie was a three-year-old American Bulldog and Pit Bull mix. To her son Eli, he was his best friend.

“I would have fun with him when he runned around and we played tag,” Eli told FOX 25.

The adults ran outside to see Opie near the fence that surrounds their yard.

“He [Opie] was over here kicking and gasping for air,” Vickie said.

The police officer used a high-powered rifle he retrieved from his police vehicle to put the dog down. He fired two more shots from the rifle in front of the children.

Malone said the officer initially told her the dog had lunged at him through the fence. According to the Wynnewood police chief, the dog charged the officer. While he declined our multiple requests for a recorded interview, Chief Ken Moore said the officer told him the dog was vicious and attacked him by coming around the corner of the house. Moore said the officer tried to kick the dog off him once and then shot him.

However, the chief said he had not seen video of the aftermath of the shooting which was provided to FOX 25. The video shows the dead dog with a gunshot wound to his head lying near the fence, not near the house.

The police chief said the officer was serving a warrant, which gave him legal authority to be on the private property. However, the Malones said they were never shown any warrant. They were only told the officer was looking for someone who had listed that address as his ten years ago.

“He said he was checking to see if a guy name Shon McNiel lived here and no one here has heard of talking about,” Malone said. The warrant for McNiel was from a 10-year-old case and the police chief said the Malone house was his last known address.

However the police chief said the department was aware the Malones had lived there for the past year. He also told FOX 25 the address was a “rent house” and that multiple people had “moved in and out” in the past decade. Moore defended the officer’s presence there saying he “had to start somewhere” in his effort to serve the warrant.

“I respect what the police do, but this was senseless, but he didn’t show any remorse and didn’t even act like he was sorry or anything,” Malone told FOX 25.

The Malones believe the death of their dog could have been avoided either by the use of less-lethal force or by fact checking on the warrant.

No matter what the reason behind the death of Opie, Eli says he misses him. He made a small wooden cross to mark the backyard gravesite.

It hurts to lose a good friend; Eli says it hurts that no one with the Wynnewood Police Department has said they’re sorry.

It is an undisputed fact — cops shoot dogs. What’s more, cops often respond to the wrong address to serve a warrant or to investigate a complaint, and end up shooting an entirely innocent person’s dog. On Tuesday, officers with the Vallejo Police Department went to an innocent couple’s home and shot their dog right in front of them.

Officers were not only unapologetic after putting two rounds in Samantha Melo and her boyfriend Manuel Trujillo’s beloved dog Rambo, but they ridiculed the couple for grieving.

Around 6:00 p.m. Tuesday afternoon, Melo and Trujillo were outside with Rambo when three officers approached the house. Curious as to who was in his front yard, Rambo rounded the corner of their home to investigate. When he turned the corner, one of the officers shot him, twice.

“All I remember [Trujillo] saying is, ‘No, no, no, don’t shoot. He’s a good dog’,” Melo said.

“By the time I turned the corner, they already shot,” Trujillo said.

Rambo was shot once in his chest and in his left hind leg. The dog ran into the house, but the couple brought him back out to the front yard to apply pressure to his wounds. Melo said she became hysterical, according to KTVU News.

“I’m standing there, and one of the officers says to me, ‘You need to calm down because you’re being annoying’,” she recalled. “He said, ‘Are you guys arguing?’ We’re like, ‘What are you talking about? We’re not arguing’.”

Police were looking for a domestic dispute and randomly targeted Melo and Trujillo.

According to Lt. Sid DeJesus with the Vallejo Police Department, officers were given an address that did not exist, so they targeted Melo and Trujillo since they were the closest.

“The initial address given by the caller to 911 was an address that in fact did not exist,” DeJesus said.

DeJesus explained that officers attempted to taser the dog, but claims that the taser did not deploy. This forced another officer to immediately fire her weapon.

“This particular officer indicated that if she did not discharge felt that she would be immediately attacked by the dog,” he said, predictably. However, apparently, the postal worker who brings the couple’s mail every day has yet to feel this way.

After their dog was shot, the couple was told that they had to take him to the vet on their own. Luckily, Rambo is expected to survive.

When Melo contacted the department, officers explained to her that they had the wrong house.

“He said it was at the wrong address and all of that would be on the police report,” she said. However, DeJesus told KTVU that officers were at the right house — in spite of having a non-existent address.

It was also revealed that all the officers were equipped with body cameras. However, all three officers conveniently forgot to turn them on before approaching the home.

This is the second such incident in only a week in which officers responding to the wrong home shot a family’s dog. Last week, while serving a decade-old warrant to the wrong house, a cowardly cop gunned down the family dog as children watched in horror during a 5-year-old boy’s birthday party.

The dog, Grizz, was shot dead by police on Friday morning after he was spooked on the job and escaped about 4am. Pilots refused to risk passenger safety by taking off with the dog on the loose.

According to the New Zealand Herald, Grizz was not on the tarmac but on the outer perimeter of the airfield. Airport staff tried to catch him for three hours without success before instructing police to shoot him.

Staff had done “everything they could”, spokeswoman Lisa Mulitalo told Fairfax New Zealand. “We’re really upset about it”.

The airport initially tweeted that Grizz had “now been caught” but later posted a clarification that the dog had been shot.

When Police showed up, they began shouting for the shooter to drop his gun. At that point, one of the Congressmen in the dugout screamed, "just shoot him."

"I thought, I was gonna die," Officer Jeronimo Yanez told investigators from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension fifteen hours after the shooting. "And I thought if he’s, if he has the, the guts and the audacity to smoke marijuana in front of the five year old girl and risk her lungs and risk her life by giving her secondhand smoke and the front seat passenger doing the same thing then what, what care does he give about me. And, I let off the rounds and then after the rounds were off, the little girls was screaming."

Anthony, a Laotian American, was assaulted by this police officer, charged with several felonies, and could face years in jail. The officer hasn't even been disciplined. We've heard stories like this way too often--racial profiling and police violence penetrating communities of color, hurting ordinary people like Anthony and violating their rights.

On-duty officers in an unmarked police vehicle shortly before 1 a.m. on June 27 saw 32-year-old Officer Taylor Clark driving his personal SUV near Roosevelt and Independence, authorities said at the time. Clark had finished his shift about 10 minutes earlier and was driving to his girlfriend’s home.

The SUV matched the description of a vehicle used in an earlier carjacking. After a short pursuit, the on-duty officers turned off their vehicle’s lights and left “a great distance” between their vehicle and Clark’s SUV, police said.

Police later said Clark’s vehicle was not the same vehicle used in the carjacking.

Clark drove his SUV through the intersection of Roosevelt and Kostner at “a high rate of speed” and collided with a car driven by 27-year-old Chequita Adams, authorities said. Adams was pronounced dead at Mount Sinai Hospital at 1:27 a.m., while Clark died at Stroger Hospital at 2:55 a.m.

...

Last week, the New York Post reported that New York City’s police union, the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, has reduced the number of PBA cards available to current and former officers. Each year, cops get a stack of these “get out of jail free” cards to give out to family and friends. If you get pulled over for speeding and flash one of these cards, the cop who flagged you down will likely let you go with a warning instead of a ticket.

The Post story quoted an unnamed “NYPD cop who retired on disability” who was extremely perturbed by the fact that PBA President Patrick Lynch had cut back the outlay from 30 to 20 cards each for current police officers and from 20 to 10 for retirees. “They are treating active members like ****, and retired members even worse than ****,” this anonymous officer said.

While police officers can’t believe that they’re getting treated so shabbily, the bigger scandal is that they get any special treatment at all. Maybe it’s naїve to believe in justice wearing a blindfold, but the boldness of institutionalizing a leniency policy via an official card makes a mockery of the notion that police try to operate on a level playing field.

And what goes for friends and family of police officers goes doubly for cops themselves. Do you think police officers ever get speeding tickets or get busted for parking illegally? If anything, when it comes to the types of minor infractions that are off limits to your average civilian, police officers flaunt their ability to do as they please. You see it every time a police cruiser is parked in front of a fire hydrant. This is something we take for granted when we talk about the police in America. To a large extent, they are above the law.

When police are put in the spotlight for allegedly breaking the law, it’s typically because they’re accused of doing something extraordinarily flagrant. Members of the Baltimore Police Department’s Gun Trace Task Force are now on trial in U.S.
District Court, accused of stealing cash out of people’s houses, keeping a stash of fake guns to plant on victims of botched shootings, and driving their cars at groups of young men, with the aim of chasing after the ones who run away. It’s like something out of a bad movie about crooked cops.

SWAT team with guns drawn raids Arizona home for toddler with fever


CHANDLER, Arizona -- Video shows a SWAT team raiding a home in Arizona with guns drawn looking for a 2-year-old child with a fever.

The raid came as a result of a fight between the toddler's parents and a doctor over his medical care.

But now, local lawmakers say it went too far.

It was a scene that resembled police trying to take down a dangerous fugitive, bust down the door with guns at the ready. But instead of a fugitive, police were looking for a toddler believed to have an extremely high fever.

State representative Kelly Townsend says she's troubled by the video, and she's played a big role in getting legislation passed requiring Children's Services to get a search warrant before removing children from a home in a non-emergency situation.

But she says she never thought this would be the result.

"The doctor chose to use DCS to remove the child, and DCS chose to use the police, and the police chose to use the SWAT team," she said. "That is not the country that I recognize."

Townsend says it all started back in February, when the parents took the 2-year-old, who isn't vaccinated, to a naturopathic doctor for a fever of about 105.

The doctor instructed the parents to take the child to the emergency room, but the fever broke after the doctor's visit, so they never went.

Upon learning that, the doctor called DCS, which then called Chandler police to check on the child.

The father refused to let police into the home, and later that night, officers came back with a search warrant.

"At that point, who now owns control over the child?" Townsend said. "And it seems like we've now given that to the doctor, and the parent no longer has a say or they risk the SWAT team taking all of the children and potentially the newborn."

Townsend says she can see both sides of the story, a concerned doctor and protective parents, but she is questioning how it was done and the amount of force used.

"We need to admit that in this situation, it was a mistake," she said. "There are other situations where there is neglect, there is abuse, and that is what we need to focus on."

Townsend said the child actually had an upper respiratory infection and not meningitis like the doctor had feared.