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Recipe for a 12 page post:

Take multiple emotionally charged elements: Dogs / children / pit bulls / fatherhood / police officer / gun / bucolic neighborhood park / college students
Stir well and heat until flashover.

What I see here is a set of primarily he said / she said circumstances, a police officer asserting that he fired his weapon at the dog as the only reasonable way to preserve his children from imminent serious injury under the circumstances as he saw them, blood on a sidewalk at a point consistent with the officer's account of the dog's location and inconsistent with other witnesses' reports of the animal's location, and a dog with a survivable bullet wound to the head.

Since this controversy has gone on for several days and the main elements haven't changed much as they continue to be reported, to me it looks very likely that all witnesses are being fairly honest about what they believe happened. Variations in perceptions that are not contradicted by physical evidence do not necessarily mean anyone is being deceptive. Any experienced investigator knows that it is extremely common for honest witnesses to report widely differing perceptions about what happened in a given incident because they witnessed the events from different distances, angles, and perspectives and filtered them through their own perceptual systems.

A dispassionate analysis of this case based on standard law enforcement methodology would virtually have to conclude that there isn't enough independently verifiable information here to reach a nonspeculative conclusion about whether the dog in question presented an actual imminent threat of serious harm to the officer and / or his children at the moment the officer fired his weapon. The blood evidence supports that the dog was close enough to have presented an imminent threat. The officer himself was in the best physical position to determine whether the dog's behavior was in fact threatening, and he acted in a manner consistent with the perception he reported. Barring any new forensic findings or direct indications that one or more witnesses are deliberately lying, there is insufficient reliable evidence to indicate that the officer acted unlawfully or inappropriately.

There's no value in beating up other members whose speculations on what really happened differ from one's own.

Life is full of stories with no satisfyingly definitive ending. This is one of them.

KBCraig wrote:Statistically speaking, there was most likely only one person there that day with a gun. Isn't it odd, then, how the dogs weren't a threat to anyone except that person's kids?

Statistics are meaningless when it comes to individual victimization by man or beast - you either are targeted or you're not. In either case, for any given incident, the statistic is 100% for you.

This is a case where use of an appropriate OC product (e.g. Kimber LifeAct) would more than likely have achieved the desired result without all the hoopla that surrounds discharge of a firearm, even when legally justified.