Florida sheriff warns protesters ahead of nationwide rallies: 'We will kill you dead'

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34. The Police Dog As Weapon of Racial Terror

The Police Dog As Weapon of Racial Terror
Police K-9 units in the United States emerged during the Civil Rights era. This was not a coincidence.

There were experiments with police dogs in England as early as the 1870s and Paris in the 1910s. Police dogs appeared on the streets of New York in 1907, but law enforcement “canine corps” didn’t become institutionalized until after Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955–1956). Baltimore (1956) and St. Louis (1958) were the pioneers. By early 1960, at least twenty-four police departments had K-9 units. Many more would soon follow, by no means confined to the South.
… The German connection was overt in Mississippi in 1961. That year, the Jackson police borrowed Happy and Rebel, two German Shepherds, from the Vicksburg police to use against Black college students staging a sit-in in a segregated public library. A local newspaper (“Police Dogs Emphasize Law, Order”) reported, and not in a critical way, that the dogs had been trained by an East German refugee who was a “former Nazi storm trooper who trained Dobermans to guard Hitler’s airports.”

https://daily.jstor.org/the-police-dog-as-weapon-of-racial-terror/