Mr. President, today the Nation closed the book on a heinous story that brought the criminal act of dogfighting into the national spotlight. Michael Vick received 23 months in jail for his actions,…
Mr. President, today the Nation closed the book on a heinous story that brought the criminal act of dogfighting into the national spotlight. Michael Vick received 23 months in jail for his actions, but that is not the end of the story. Nor is it the end of the nation's attack on dogfighting.
Dogfighting is reprehensible in its own right. There is no justification for the intentional mauling and destruction of a living animal. But it is a precursor of so much more. That is why we must continue to fight these crimes.
Dogfighting isn't just about cruelty to animals. Dogfights are one becoming an increasingly profitable enterprise for violent gangs. These criminals can bring in as much as $25,000 by selling a champion dog on the black market, and they can take a cut from bets that can run in excess of $100,000 for a single fight. Stopping animal cruelty means cutting off the flow of money that these criminals use to intimidate and terrorize their communities.
Studies show that animal cruelty is a steppingstone to violent crimes against humanity. When the FBI profiles serial killers, they try to find out if they have a history of animal abuse. If someone's been prosecuted for animal cruelty, they are four times more likely to commit a violent crime. The Chicago Police Department found that almost 6 out of every 10 people arrested for crimes against animals turned out to be members of gangs. Animal cruelty is one of the strongest indicators of participation in other acts of violence that criminologists have ever discovered.
No on can argue that this barbaric practice should continue. But there is an unnecessary barrier to stopping it: gathering reliable data on animal fighting is more difficult than it should be. We don't have a good idea of how fast it is growing because of a simple problem with how the crime is categorized.
That is why I introduced the Tracking Animal Cruelty Crimes Act, which would list cruelty to animals as a separate offense category in the three major crime reporting systems used by the federal government. It's time to begin tracking these crimes, so we can better understand it--and ultimately so we can shut down this vast, exploding and increasingly lucrative criminal enterprise.
Currently in the world of criminal justice, there are ``Type I'' crimes, like homicide and arson, and ``Type II'' crimes, like drug abuse, gambling, and vagrancy. But then there are crimes that are thrown into a category called ``Other.'' Acts of animal cruelty, including dogfighting, are in the ``Other'' category. That means law enforcement can't separate out and analyze data about them.
How are we supposed to come up with an effective policy to target animal cruelty if that data is lumped together with other totally unrelated crimes? But there is a simple fix to this problem. Once law enforcement officials can gather information on animal cruelty as a separate category, they can track criminal activity, monitor trends, allocate resources more efficiently, and ultimately stop these criminals before they commit even more heinous crimes.
The repulsive blood-sport of dogfighting is a truly national problem, including in my home State of New Jersey, where last year officials found a dog ring in a bunker 11-feet underground. That was during a drug raid, showing how tied up that activity is with illegal gambling, drugs, and violence.
If we are going to combat a culture of violence wherever it exists in this country, we need to do everything in our power to stop the gangs that terrorize our streets and cut off their flow of money--whether it is through setting tougher penalties for gang activities, expanding funding for community policing, or boosting prevention efforts such as after-school programs.
For the sake of the safety of our communities, I urge my colleagues to take swift action to enact this important legislation.
