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.
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.