On the front page of the Wednesday, June 15, edition, we covered the story of a Village of Oak Creek couple whose house was vandalized allegedly due to a barking dog.
Someone spray painted “STOP Dog BARKS ALL Day STOP” across the couple’s garage door and wall.
A barking dog is a public nuisance and if steps are not taken to quiet the animal, it can eventually be seized by animal control officers at the city or county level. In some rare cases, the owners could be charged with a misdemeanor.
Conversely, vandalism is a unquestioningly a misdemeanor and, in some cases, a felony, depending on the nature and scale of the vandalism.
I am too young to wax nostalgic for the “good old days” when neighbors settled disputes in the Mayberry-esque fashion of 1960s black-and-white television, but I do wonder why someone would risk a felony arrest over a misdemeanor complaint when it would be far easier to speak with owners or just call animal control.
Incessantly barking dogs are annoying, but based on our email correspondence and Ron Eland’s phone interview, dog owners Rita and Bruce Bond seem like reasonable people who would have been more than willing to alleviate the problem. But now these seniors must spend hundreds to have their wall and garage door repainted while Yavapai County Sheriff’s Office deputies will waste taxpayer dollars hunting for the vandal or vandals.
We increasingly live in an era where it is easier to attack strangers anonymously, most often through social media platforms like Facebook.
The Online Disinhibition Effect describes how people behave differently than they would in real life due to dissociative anonymity, online invisibility, asynchronicity, solipsistic introjection of the target and dissociative imagination of the attacker’s self-identity.
The vitriol one can find online is simultaneously saddening and infuriating, but at least it remains online and users can opt out of reading the comments, where the worst offenders troll.
However, when that disinhibition spills back into the real world, an act like vandalism seems justified to the criminal, even though it is an exaggerated, asymmetric reaction to a relatively minor dispute.
For example, just Thursday morning, the discussion of Great Britain’s possible exit from the European Union turned violent when a gunman shot dead anti-exit British Labour Party lawmaker Jo Cox. No policy debate should ever escalate to murder, nor should a barking dog result in vandalism.
Speak to your neighbors and resolve disputes peacefully. If that doesn’t work contact Animal Control in Sedona at (928) 282-3100, outside city limits in Yavapai County at (928) 771-3260 or in Coconino County at (928) 679-8756.
