RIP Kiah Duggins (above), civil rights lawyer, legal scholar and professor at Howard University. She was on the plane that crashed in DC last week. Sumayya Saleh tweeted that Duggins was “an unapologetic radical, abolitionist, anti-Zionist movement lawyer whose North Star was Black liberation and prosperity.”

You can soak up the brilliance of Duggins debating bail reform here. To honor her, we are re-posting a piece she wrote with Bina Ahmad below. It was originally posted in The Appeal. Ahmad and Duggins argue for the abolition of police dogs, digging into the history of how they were used to hunt those who ran away from slavery.

The Thirteenth Amendment purported to abolish chattel slavery, along with what an 1883 Supreme Court decision called its “badges and incidents.” But the amendment left some infamous carve-outs: Namely, it remains legal to enslave people who have been convicted of a crime. But there is another remaining “badge and incident” of slavery that we must uproot: the police’s use of K9 units. The police’s practice of using dogs to attack human beings derives from enslavers’ practice of using slave hounds to attack enslaved people. This coercive history harms human beings and animals in order to perpetuate the racial and economic interests of people in power. One way we can honor the Thirteenth Amendment’s promise to rid our society of slavery—all of its badges and incidents—is by getting dogs out of policing.

State-sanctioned canine attacks–like those implemented by modern police canine units–were common in chattel slavery. Legal scholar Madalyn Wasilczuk speaks of how white enslavers “conceived of an enslaved person’s attempt to obtain freedom as a type of high-value property theft, appropriately recaptured with brute force.” The use of dog attacks to preserve enslavers’ economic interests was legal, and thus not a rare act committed by a few bigots. Wasilczuk explains that the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 federally legalized slave patrols’ ability to seize slaves in free states, often accompanied by hunting dogs—and the act was later nicknamed “the Bloodhound Bill” as a result. Legal scholar Michael Swistara stresses that these dog attacks were intentionally gruesome. Swistara explains how, as early as the 1700s, records show enslavers “bred Cuban bloodhounds with the explicit purpose of raising them to enact violence against Black people” and “the scars of dog bites were so common that they” were physical badges of slavery, becoming “marks used to identify [Black] escapees in advertisements for rewards.”

Continue reading “RIP Kiah Duggins” →