Daytona Beach, FL - Local police begin to combat an influx of animal cruelty and abuse cases, announcing the creation of a new task force.
The Daytona Beach Police Department announced the conception of a brand new task force aimed at dealing with cases that are specific to animal abuse named the Animal Cruelty Investigations Unit.
"The agency has always had animal control, as most agencies do," says Sergeant Robert Ransom with DBPD. "(but) we've decided to take a proactive approach and look at furthering the knowledge and education of our animal control officers as well as a couple of our individual police officers."
According to Ransom, the main purpose of the new unit is to ensure that DBPD conducts a thorough and complete investigation, that they have spoken to all the experts in the field and that they have all the necessary and important information so that when they go forward and work with the state attorney's office they have an "airtight" case.
He also told WNDB that the idea of creating the unit came with an increase of animal abuse cases and investigations in the area.
However, some are not necessarily abuse cases at all.
"Sometimes they come in reported as abuse cases and when we investigate them we find that they're not abuse cases at all," Ransom commented. "The animals may have worms or other things that may make them look like they're abused when actually they're going through treatment."
Ransom also noted that a lot of the cases that DBPD deals with comes from concerns neighbors, saying that as teachers watch over the kids, animal lovers and neighbors do the same as they watch over the pets in their neighborhood.
