Riverside County, California Deputy Falls & Shoots Self While Trying to Kill A Rottweiler

by Joshua Scott Hotchkin
Cop Block
Sep. 03, 2015

A Riverside County (California) Sheriff’s Office Deputy was responding to a call in Lake Elsinore about a suspicious person looking into windows on Tuesday morning. While investigating the residence which the call came from, the unknown deputy encountered a rottweiler. According to Deputy Mike Vasquez, speaking on behalf of the Sheriff’s Office, this is what happened between the dog and the as-yet unnamed officer:

“The dog charged at the deputy,” Vasquez wrote,”and in an effort to protect himself, he fell backwards while drawing his duty weapon and unintentionally shot himself in the leg.”

Fortunately, the dog was uninjured, and Vasquez’s self-inflicted wound was not life-threatening. He was given first aid at the scene and then transported to the hospital for further treatment.

I guess that either the dog was scared away by the sound of the gunshot, or it never intended any harm to the deputy, as it did not attack the officer after he blasted himself in the leg.

A similar incident earlier this year in Burlington, Iowa left a woman dead after an officer decided to shoot her dog, fell, and instead shot her on the way down. You can read the tragic story of Autumn Steele RIGHT HERE.

Whether it is the abuse and/or death of their own police K9’s, or the killing of citizens pet dogs, police are becoming one of the largest dangers to that entire species. I really feel that at this point cops have lost the privilege of forcing man’s best friend into laboring for them. Police should be banned from using dogs in police work since they appear to have so little regard for the animals.

On the other hand, it is extremely rare that an adult human dies from a dog attack. Despite there being so few reports of serious injury or deaths to people or police officers, police still get a rock hard MUH LIFE! boner when encountering the animals. While dogs can engage our primal fears, most of us are able to control them well enough to avoid having to kill them on a regular basis. But police are being conditioned to constantly fear for their lives so much that behind every corner or every moving, living thing, they see a threat to their existence. This engineered paranoia makes police radically and unnecessarily dangerous not just to his fellow man, but to man’s best friend, the dog.