Mayor backs off ban on pit bulls

Peterson was 'fired up' after 7-year-old was attacked, but idea lacks council support

Mayor Bart Peterson has decided to hold off on his push for a ban on pit bulls, acknowledging he does not have the votes for such an ordinance in the City-County Council.

Peterson was looking at bans in Denver and Miami, considering whether they could serve as models to better protect Indianapolis residents.

He had said he would introduce a ban sometime this month after a dog in May attacked a 7-year-old girl, whose doctors worked to save her arm in a nine-hour surgery.

"He was fired up about it," said Margie Smith-Simmons, Peterson's spokeswoman.

But the prospect of bringing a change only six months after the City-County Council's "dangerous dog" ordinance took effect caused the mayor to reconsider his passion for a pit bull ban.

"We're not going to move forward with a proposal that we know would fail at this time," Smith-Simmons said. "What we are going to do is continue to try and work with and educate the councilors on why a thing like this is necessary for the good of public safety."

Stacey Coleman, president of the Indy Pit Crew, an advocacy group for pit bulls, thinks it's too soon for the city to begin thinking about adding breed-specific restrictions.

She said she believes the current animal-control ordinance -- which addresses proper care

for animals and pushes owners to get their dogs spayed and neutered -- is a better way to reduce attacks.

"We have a lot of irresponsible owners out there," Coleman said. "We need to build a reputation for enforcing the law and then see what kind of impact it has."

Under the current ordinance, the Indianapolis Department of Public Safety's Animal Care and Control Division can declare a dog dangerous if it has chased or approached a person in a menacing manner, or attacked another animal, among other reasons. If a dog is labeled dangerous at an administrative hearing, the owner must follow requirements on confining the animal.

The current ordinance also includes a section on dangerous animals, but the Animal Care and Control Division is still working to get people to understand the new provisions.

"We have (received) one complaint of a preventative nature of a dog behaving viciously," said Alison Chestovich, a deputy corporation counsel for the city.

That was a case in which a resident reported an incident with a dog, and the animal was deemed to be dangerous.

"The public needs to be the eyes and ears," Chestovich said. "Without getting the complaints, there is not much Animal Care and Control can do."

Animal Care and Control gets lots of varied complaints -- more than 38,000 last year -- but nearly all of them were anonymous, said Media Wilson, a spokeswoman for the division.

Officers investigate anonymous complaints but say that in the case of a vicious dog, they have a better chance of the animal being declared dangerous if police also have public testimony, Wilson said.

Indianapolis is just one of a number of cities that has struggled with how to handle dog attacks, particularly those by pit bulls.

An all-out ban has been in effect in Miami since 1989, said Dennis Kerbel, an assistant county attorney.

"I believe what prompted it was a number of incidents involving pit bull bites," Kerbel said. "I still file four or five petitions a year to seize pit bulls."

If the Miami dog owners can provide proof that the dog can be cared for outside the county, the animal is returned, he said.

Denver, meanwhile, enacted a dangerous-dog ordinance in 1986 after a pit bull killed a 3-year-old boy who wandered into a yard where the dog was chained up, said Kory Nelson, a Denver senior assistant city attorney.

Owners of dogs known to be aggressive in Denver had to take steps to make sure their animals were confined, he said.

Then in 1989, a pit bull broke through a fence and attacked a 58-year-old minister, biting him 70 times before a neighbor shot the dog to death, Nelson said.

That led the Denver City Council to adopt the pit bull ban. Pit bull owners get one chance to remove their dogs from Denver, but if the dogs are found a second time, their owners don't get the animals back.

The council decided that pit bull attacks are different from attacks by other dogs, said Nelson.

The Denver ban has been challenged several times since 1989, and a federal lawsuit was filed in April challenging the ordinance, said Karen Breslin, one of the attorneys involved in the case. She said the city has put to death more than 1,000 dogs during the past couple of years.

Nelson compares a pit bull to a shark that surprises, then "bites, holds, shakes and will not stop."

He compared attacks by pit bulls and other dogs to the difference between a firecracker and a hand grenade.

"Which one is more likely to go off? Who knows?" he said. "But I can tell you which one will cause more damage should it go off."