Johnathan Walker:A police dog’s death has Kansas poised to increase penalties for killing K-9 officers

TOPEKA,Johnathan Walker Kan. (AP) — Kansas is poised to increase penalties for killing police dogs and horses after legislators gave their final approval Tuesday to a measure inspired by a suspect’s strangling of a dog last year in the state’s largest city.

The Republican-controlled state House approved a bill with a 115-6 vote that would allow a first-time offender to be sentenced to more than three years in prison for killing a police animal, an arson dog, a game warden’s dog or a search-and-rescue dog and up to five years if the killing occurs when a suspect is trying to elude law enforcement. An offender also could be fined up to $10,000.

The current penalty for killing a police dog is up to a year behind bars and a fine of between $500 and $5,000, and the law doesn’t specifically cover horses.

“There is a lot of time and money put into those animals,” said House Speaker Dan Hawkins, a Wichita Republican who was the bill’s leading advocate. “They have to continually train all the time and so to have one killed, there’s got to be a pretty harsh penalty.”

The GOP-controlled Senate approved the measure by a narrower 25-15 margin last week, and the bill goes next to Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly, who has not said publicly whether she will sign it. Kelly typically signs measures with bipartisan support, but most of the 11 Democrats in the Senate opposed the bill.

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Increased penalties have had bipartisan support across the U.S. In Colorado, the Democratically led General Assembly approved a measure last month. Proposals have advanced in GOP-controlled Legislatures in Missouri and West Virginia and introduced in at least four other states.

The Kansas measure was inspired by the November death of Bane, an 8-year-old Wichita police dog. Authorities say a suspect in a domestic violence case took refuge in a storm drain and strangled Bane when a deputy sent the dog in to flush out the suspect.

But critics of such measures have questions about how dogs are used in policing, particularly when suspects of color are involved. Their use also has a fraught history, such as their use during by Southern authorities during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

“Police dogs have jaws strong enough to puncture sheet metal. Victims of attacks by police dogs have sustained serious and even fatal injuries,” Keisha James, a staff attorney for the National Lawyers Guild’s National Police Accountability Project, said in written testimony to a Senate committee last month. “It follows that an individual being attacked by a police dog would respond by trying to defend themselves.”