CW: POLICE VIOLENCE, DOGS, GUNS.
The owner according to some reports is a homeless man. They were shot because someone accused the dogs of biting them to the police. The person who called them did not have an injury that required a medical unit. Witnesses say she wasn't bitten, but got her legs caught in the leads. The homeless man was tazed. The homeless man was currently on a ban list for owning dogs. For animal cruelty or as a result of anti-homeless policemen previously taking his dog for anti homeless reasons? I don't know.
Regardless, they sent a unit of about 15 officers, including multiple armed units to go deal with a homeless man and his dogs. Say it's 8 officers, that's 2 armed + 6 unarmed paid for 1 hours work (8), when you could send 1 armed officer (?), and 1 unarmed officer to do a few hours of de escalation work, (8 paid hours if it takes 4 hours by two officers). I feel like with two calm people they easily could've de-escalated the situation to just talk with the man about it first rather than going in as a squad guns blazing. Same hours paid. No gun discharge. No tazing homeless man.
If this were a homeless person without a record, without a dog ban, and without several pre-existing videos that don't exactly look great then I think he would be much more sympathisable.
It's not just that he's homeless. It's incredibly easy to get people to have sympathy for the homeless in the UK, exceptionally different conditions in fact. We only have between 3000-4000 rough sleepers nationally because people don't like it and want them helped. This empathy people have for the homeless is a serious force politically and lets us force a lot of social help. It's a damn serious difference to the 500,000+ rough sleepers the US has. It's very important to understand that the UK's "homeless" statistic includes anyone sleeping on someone's sofa or living in non-permanent residence anywhere, such as with a friend, rough sleepers is the term we use for those without a roof at all.
Granted the tories are making the situation worse, but their progress is slow because people by and large do not hate the homeless in the UK. You can not translate the american conditions to the UK. It's not the same.
Holy shit, I never realised how bad America was for homelessness. My old city was one of the UK's homeless capitals so I used to hear about it a lot, but never realised our rough sleeper stats were so relatively low. Now that I think back on it, it was often the same homeless person that roamed an area, I just used to see them a lot so it felt like there were maybe more of them.