Austin police officers shot and killed another dog last week. They described the dog as a pit bull, because of course. They also say that dashboard camera footage supports their version of the story—”that the officers had no choice but to respond that way to this dog that was charging at them,” and that “they didn’t have time to have a plan B to draw their Tasers or draw their pepper spray this is a matter of seconds”—although the family adamantly disputes their account:

[Alicia] Guerrero says when the family member holding on to the dog let go, officers shot the animal in the head. She says the dog was retreating to the house when it was shot a second time, ultimately dying on the front stoop.

The dashboard camera footage is not yet available, so the world will have to wait to see what it shows. The policy for APD officers since 2012—prompted by another infamous shooting of a dog—is that they can only shoot if they are in imminent danger of bodily harm. The question, of course, is how officers interpret what dog behavior constitutes “imminent danger of bodily harm,” and how much resemblance it bears to actual imminent danger of bodily harm.

This might be a good time to note this map, created by Matthew M. Turner, showing various police shootings of dogs around the country between 2011 and 2013. There have been quite a few.

It hasn’t been a great few weeks for dogs in encounters with police, although it hasn’t been much better for the police. A sheriff’s deputy in Riverside, California apparently shot himself in the foot while drawing his weapon on a dog that was either approaching him in an aggressive manner or just barking at him.

A truly heartbreaking story comes from Rains County, Texas, where a sheriff’s deputy, responding to a homeowner’s call about a burglary, is accused of shooting a dog that was barking and, the deputy claimed, charging at him. He shot the 2 year-old blue heeler in the back of the head, which was not fatal. Here’s what the homeowner, Cole Middleton, says happened next:

Earlier this week, Cole Middleton explained on Facebook that he had contacted the Rains County Sheriff’s Department about a robbery last Friday.

Middleton admitted that his 3-year-old dog, Candy, was probably barking when the Deputy Jerred Dooley arrived, but he insisted that the animal had never bitten anyone.

“I shot your dog, sorry,” Middleton recalled Dooley saying.

Middleton said Candy had been shot behind the ear, but she was not dead.

“I BEGGED him to shoot her again (SINCE MY WEAPONS WERE STOLEN!) and he refused,” Middleton wrote on Facebook. “I then had to do the otherwise unthinkable and take my poor baby’s life with my own hands while praying for this to be over with.”

In a video posted to Facebook, Middleton sobbed as he told other officers how he was forced to drown Candy.

“They then asked, ‘Well whose blood is on your shirt?’ That is the blood of my dog that I was holding because this deputy pulled up and shot her in my yard. Then the Tasers were put away and the pistols withdrawn,” Middleton told KLTV.

The deputy has since lost his job with the Rains County Sheriff’s Department. He has hired his own attorney, and is reportedly distraught over the shooting.

To be absolutely clear, the now-former deputy does not deserve the death threats he has been getting over this. The situation does deserve, however, more serious consideration regarding the ongoing erosion of trust between police and the public. I will seriously think twice should I ever need to call the police to my home, knowing that we have two dogs who bark at everything and everyone that passes in front of our house. This doesn’t even scratch the surface of people getting shot by police.

Speaking of erosion of trust, a Georgetown, Texas police officer is on paid leave after video footage showed him allegedly tripping at least one student and shoving another on a soccer field. Students at Vandegrift High School rushed the field after the girls’ soccer team won the state championship game. The school board president expressed some concerns:

She said when students rushed on the field, some of them did pile on top of the soccer players and the officer could have been concerned about that. “I’m sure he was just trying to keep the players safe; it was just his method in which he chose to do it that’s questionable,” Waggoner said.

Parents who were in the bleachers filmed what happened with the officer, she said. “They were pretty upset,” Waggoner said. “I wasn’t even out of the stadium before they were putting it on YouTube,” she said.

I couldn’t resist making a couple of GIFs from the video: