I'm questioning whether attack dogs should be allowed to act as police officers.  K-9 units suffer from the fundamental flaw of not being able to understand the concepts of the legal system that are required of every human officer to carry out their duties in a lawful and just manner.  Within police lore there is the concept of officers needing to walk the 'thin blue line' which is an unwritten rule that is based on written rules and laws.  The idea states that all officers must walk a conceptual 'balance beam' in their enforcement duties whereby they must avoid falling either towards the side of excessive force or towards the side of complacency.  And while it may be part of a police dogs training to demonstrate the ability to walk a physical balance beam, I'm not aware of any part of their training having to learn how to walk the conceptual balance beam that is the thin blue line.  Instead, K-9 attack dogs seem to just default to falling towards the excessive force side of the line and are wholly dependent on their handlers to keep out of that side.  However, anyone who has watched any amount of those reality cop shows knows that the ability of human officers to restrain and control their K-9 dogs is highly flawed.  If one were to look on a police dog as a robot, those robots would have been recalled a long time ago for having a highly defective off-switch that only works sporadically.  And local governments and politicians would never allow those robots back on the streets until that off-switch was properly repaired.  This problem is only compounded further when the human handlers let their K-9 units off their leash to seek and detain a suspect that is hiding out of site.  In that case, where the human officer cannot even see their dogs in action, how can the dogs possibly be restrained at all -- there effectively is no attempt to ensure minimum force is used to detain the suspect.  And yet there still remains the requirement that all human officers must follow, and that is to use the minimum amount of force necessary to detain a suspect.  In no way is an officer supposed to act in a punitive manner towards a suspect.  We must keep to the forefront of our minds that all suspects are presumed innocent.  Therefore, any police dog that continues to bite a citizen even after he has stopped moving away from the police or resisting arrest, that dog is mauling a citizen that must still be thought of as an innocent civilian.  But all K-9 officers act as though all civilians are presumed guilty.  Anyone who has peacefully and lawfully walked along the side of a squad car with a K-9 unit in the car will realize the intense animosity police attack dogs have towards all civilians.  Police K-9 dogs then act as a sort of loophole for the requirement that everyone is presumed innocent and minimum force to detain be used.  The police sort of wash their hands of their dogs actions, saying effectively "it's not my fault for the excessive force, it's the dogs."  Therefore, it is my recommendation that this loophole be closed and all police dogs acting in an attack role (as apposed to a purely investigative role using their sniffers) be removed from service until assurance can be provided that they will be able to use as minimal force to detain suspects as their human counterparts are able to.