From [HERE] Some of the most horrifically indelible images of the Civil Rights struggle show police dogs attacking young demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. Birmingham became emblematic of animalistic police brutality against non-violent protestors—but it wasn’t unique at the time. And the racial weaponization of dogs isn’t just something of that time, as examples from Abu Ghriab (2004) to Ferguson (2014) show.

Scholar Tyler Wall doesn’t think it’s coincidental that K-9 units were introduced in police departments across the country during the Civil Rights era of the 1950s and 1960s, however. Quoting advocates of the day, Wall writes that dogs were deployed as tools to “civilize the savagery of urban (dis)order by pacifying urban space.” In practice, this meant dogs were deployed in the “criminalization of the so-called Negro problem,” to “police the material and symbolic boundaries of the color line,” and to enforce the dehumanization of people of color.

“The mystical power of the police dog […] was its apparent ability to recognize the boundaries dividing those bodies in need of protection—white propertied bodies—from those darker bodies prowling on the boundaries of white bourgeois order.” [MORE]