Cruelty Is A Crime

In response to an email I received I explain why I am against the concept of Humane Law Enforcement.  To begin with, there are well over one million sworn law enforcement officers across the country.  Those beat officers are on the street 24/7/365.  Those officers can be dispatched immediately to investigate allegations of criminal activity via 911.  If the criminal activity happens to be a crime against an animal, those officers have the authority to seize animals on the spot and immediately end their suffering.  None of these things can be said for civilian humane investigators.
Since I was a Chicago Police Officer I will focus on the laws in that state of Illinois.  The Humane Care for Animals Act defines the role of humane investigator and gives them the “authority” to investigate any violation of the Act.  However, the Act does not give the humane investigator the authority to immediately seize and animal.  Furthermore, the Act cannot give the humane investigator the authority to arrest anyone.  Nor can a humane investigator obtain a search warrant.  The most the humane investigator can do is either gain voluntary compliance from the offender or petition the Department of Agriculture for an order to remove the animal after the animal continues to suffer for an additional 48-hours.

If the Department of Agriculture does issue such an order, keep in mind; it is only a civil order.  The offender can still decide to ignore it.  What does the humane investigator do with said order if the animal in question is now confined inside a home?  What does the humane investigator do when the offender becomes violent over an attempt to take his animal?  Which is a likely occurrence due to a known link between animal abuse and violence toward humans.

Additionally, when a humane investigator shows up to investigate animal abuse it sends the message to the offender that what he is doing actually isn’t a crime.  If it were, why wouldn’t the police be there?  I have experienced this phenomenon several times myself.  I have arrested people for animal abuse who were previously investigated by the Anti-Cruelty Society.  I’ve had someone tell me they didn’t heed the ACS warning because he didn’t think it was serious.  Another time I seized two litters of pitbull puppies and several adult dogs after an Anti-Cruelty Society investigator left a warning, and when I arrested the owner he advised that had I not seized his dogs when I did that he would have simply moved the animals to another location.  My partners actually had to fight with one offender who had been visited at least three times by ACS prior to his arrest.  He too didn’t understand why he was being arrested when “the Anti-Cruelty Society didn’t do anything”.

But law enforcement doesn’t place a high priority on these kinds of calls.  It is my experience that when CPD did respond there was very rarely any type of enforcement action taken, even when a complaint was bona fide.  I liken the police approach to animal abuse today to how drunk driving was treated 30-years ago.  Back then, if nobody was injured by a DUI no arrest was made.  It was routine to blow off DUI arrest.  Fortunately, thanks to the efforts of MADD and others, DUI arrests are an every day occurrence.  MADD didn’t create Mother’s Law Enforcement.  They made law enforcement understand that drunk drivers had a negative impact on society.

Or you can compare law enforcement’s approach to animal abuse to how they treated domestic violence in the past.  There was a time when domestics were seen as “a family problem” even though it was actually a crime.  More often than not, an offender was told to take a walk around the block rather than get arrested.  Today there is too much liability in such an approach.  The Chicago Police Department’s policy on how to handle domestics is covered in one of the longest general orders in effect.  No police officer today would think about blowing off a domestic call because domestic violence groups made police departments understand that making domestic violence arrests were in fact interrupting the cycle of violence.  They didn’t accomplish this by conducting their own investigations.

Women’s shelters do not investigate crimes against women.  Animal shelters should not investigate crimes against animals.  Shelters (women’s or animal) should play a supporting role to law enforcement.  They should provide transportation, shelter, treatment, and advocacy in court.  But when humane organizations conduct their own investigations (often justifying the need due to the lack of a proper police response) they are absolving the police from their statutory responsibility to address crime and disorder.  It becomes a never-ending circle.

What I would like to see is an end to all civilian investigations (animal control officers, humane investigators, Department of Ag, etc) so that the onus for responding to these crimes rests solely with the police.  The police may not like this, but you know what, as a police officer I didn’t have the luxury of deciding what calls I went to and what ones I didn’t.  I didn’t particularly like picking up shoplifters and wasting time processing them knowing that nobody from the store would show up to prosecute, resulting in the case being dismissed.  But that was part of my job.

Animal abuse should no longer be looked at as an “animal issue”.  Animal abuse has a negative impact on society.  There is plenty of documentation linking animal abuse and violence toward humans.  Most, if not all, serial killers have a history of abusing animals.  A study of three years worth of animal abuse arrests by the Chicago Police Department showed that 70% of those arrested had criminal histories that included crimes against persons. So it should be obvious why law enforcement would want to arrest animal abusers.  And if we could get the police to basically do their job, the number of animals that would benefit would be exponential.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, January 17th, 2009 at 1:23 am and is filed under Personal Experiences, The Problem.... You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.