By Adam Longo
Snowflake, AZ (KPHO) — A video recently captured in Snowflake, AZ, shows a police officer threatening to arrest a woman’s dog.
The 45-second video was uploaded to Facebook on March 7 and has received more than 465,000 views.
Here is a portion of the exchange between Terri Franklin, the woman who posted the video and the Snowflake-Taylor police officer:
“So am I under arrest?” the woman asks.
“No, your dog is though,” the officer responds.
“My dog’s under arrest. For what?” she responds.
“For a vicious and large dog …” the officer said and was then interrupted.
“She’s not vicious,” says Franklin.
“She came at me,” the officer says before being interrupted again.
A representative of the Snowflake-Taylor Police Department tells CBS5 the incident was reviewed and the officer was found to have done nothing wrong.
“He just shouldn’t have said what he said,” the official said.
CBS 5 News received the incident report from the Snowflake-Taylor Police Department. The report indicates the officer was dispatched to the scene because a woman claims she was unable to get into her car because of “two aggressive dogs.”
The incident took place outside of a Dollar General store. Terri Franklin was inside shopping and her dogs were in the car.
The dogs allegedly made menacing gestures towards the woman who reported the incident, and in the incident report the officer writes one of the dogs was “barking and growling, showing its teeth and acting extremely aggressive.”
The officer then goes into the store, locates Franklin and asks her to roll up the windows of her car, according to the report. “The lady almost immediately became very belligerent, raising her voice and yelling,” the officer wrote in the incident report.
Franklin, on her Facebook page, wrote this about the incident:
“So today a woman was scared to get into her car because my pit bull barks and growls when someone gets too close to my car, even though she is the most loving dog she just is protective of me and my vehicle. This woman called the police instead of coming into the store and asking for the owner of the car/dog. Police officer shows up and asks me to roll up the window which I immediately do and apologize to the woman for my dog scaring her. Officer proceeds to demand my driver’s license. I, of course, refuse as I have done nothing wrong and then ask him if I am under arrest.”
“She said she wouldn’t give me her ID,” the officer wrote in his report. “I told her I could cite her for vicious dog at large and impound the dog.”
Ultimately, the police officer ends up walking away from Franklin.
“I concluded that pushing the issue further would have pushed the dog owner into doing something bad and forcing a situation where she could have been arrested. I told the lady although I thought the dogs could have been impounded for being vicious, she was free to go,” the officer concluded in his report.