We don't even know the numbers: experts tell us that every year somewhere between several hundred to several thousand pets are killed by police. If we take into account Federal agencies like USDA's Wildlife Services and include animals without owners like coyotes, wolves, birds and gophers, the number of animals killed exceeds 3 million annually. Even where numbers are available, lack of an understanding of national trends prevents us from placing them in context:

"Recent statistics indicate there are more police shootings of dogs in Chicago than in New York or Los Angeles, but there's no clear reason why." - Chicago Tribune
"No one keeps national statistics of how often police shoot dogs." - Daily Reckoning

WHAT WE DO

The goal of PuppycideDB is to provide a fast, comprehensive record of every police shooting of an animal in the United States using open source software that can be shared freely and anonymously with anyone and hosted anywhere.

Previous attempts to compile police shooting statistics have relied heavily on hosted applications (such as Google forms) that pose privacy issues to sources and do not scale well. To avoid technical problems, costs and most importantly - the privacy of our users and sources - we develop our own web applications and rely on our own research.

Crowd-sourcing is just part of how we hope to accomplish this. As the project grows, more and more of our data will be collected automatically, using algorithmic tools to collect data from large data repositories like Common Crawl and Public.Resource.Org.

PLEASE HELP!

Anyone is welcome to add to the database using our online form. This project is run by a small, but highly dedicated, group of journalists, engineers, students, lawyers and researchers. In the short time that the Puppycide Database Project has been active, we have created the largest publicly accessible database of police shootings of animals in the United States. But we have a long way to go before every killing is accounted for. Only a small percentage of animal shootings are covered by the news. We need help from people willing to research court documents, interview the families of victims and develop technology to make our research more accessible to journalists and the public. Ultimately, the success of this project depends on you. This project can provide a voice for those who can't speak for themselves. But only if you are willing to speak on their behalf. Contact us today so we can work together to make a difference.

THE DETAILS

While there are websites that track court records for animal cruelty criminal charges like pet-abuse.com, until now there has been no comprehensive national or even state-wide database tracking the killing of animals by law enforcment personnel while on the job. This has left the scope of the problem up for debate. Facts have not been readily available, allowing police to minimize the killing of pets as a rare neccessity and preventing journalists from challenging those claims.

The Puppycide Database Project aims to correct this deficit of information by providing a high quality database of every police shooting of an animal in the US. From time to time, we will also use our own research to provide objective commentary, research analysis and visualizations of the data we collect. It is our hope that making this information publicly available will allow for the public to engage in a legitimate discussion of police use of force policy.