Dog’s Name on Patrol Car Angers Italian-Americans : Sheriff’s Department: A Camarillo woman started the campaign against displaying ‘Dago.’

The Ventura County Sheriff’s Department has come under fire by a national Italian-American organization for painting the word “Dago,” the name of one of its police dogs, on the side of a patrol car.

But Sheriff’s Department officials said the German shepherd’s name, which a German kennel gave the dog at birth, is pronounced “dahgo” and they see nothing wrong with it.

“It’s not a racial slur. It’s not an epithet,” said Deputy Chuck Buttell, the handler who has worked with Dago for four years. “We sure don’t mean to upset anybody. It’s just his name.”

Officials at Unico National, an Italian-American service organization based in Bloomfield, N.J., disagreed Tuesday, saying that the word is disparaging to people of Italian descent and should be taken off the car.

“You should have second thoughts about having such a name, especially on a sheriff’s car,” said Emanuel Elfano, national chairman of the organization.

Elfano said the word is disparaging to people of Italian descent.

The November edition of the organization’s magazine will detail the issue and request that the organization’s 7,000 members write protest letters to Sheriff John Gillespie or anyone who can champion their cause.

The organization also has sent letters detailing the situation to Gov. George Deukmejian, the Sons of Italy and the sheriff in Essex County, N.J., hoping that he would appeal to Gillespie as a fellow officer.

Gillespie was unavailable for comment.

Unico National learned about the patrol car in a letter from Evelyn Burns, a Camarillo woman who first saw the name on the patrol car Oct. 12, 1989, and began campaigning against it.

“Those are the kinds of names we don’t want our children growing up knowing,” Burns said.

Burns said she sent letters to newspapers soon after seeing the car and received a reply from Gillespie, who explained the pronunciation of the dog’s name.

She then sent another letter to papers asking that the dog’s name be spelled phonetically on the car but had no further correspondence from the Sheriff’s Department.

Burns said she let the matter drop for months until she learned that some Italian-American groups were trying to get the Department of Motor Vehicles to disallow personal license plates bearing the word “dago” or another derogatory term for Italians.

A Sons of Italy petition with 300 signatures asking that such license plates be banned resulted in California’s first mass recall of personalized license plates, although many of them belonged to Italian-Americans.

Burns, an instructional aide for special education students in the county, said when she first saw the word on the police car it struck her “as not being right” and she hopes the spelling of the dog’s name is changed on the car.

But Buttell, saying the name is properly spelled, said he believes the name should stay.

Each of the four sheriff’s patrol cars that carries a police dog and its handler bears the name of the dog and “K-9” to identify it as a canine unit, Buttell said.

Buttell said it is important that the car bears the dog’s name so that in the confusion of an emergency another officer does not jump in the car and risk his safety with Dago, who is trained to let only his partner in the car.

Buttell said he and Dago often give demonstrations to groups of children. Buttell tells them to look out for Dago’s car in Camarillo, where he is based, and wave when they see him.

The 75-pound police dog, whose full name is Dago Van Der Landzunge Hila, has searched for felons, evidence and lost children.

Buttell said the dog’s name was never an issue until Burns’ first letter.

Sheriff’s Lt. Mike Pitts, whose three grandparents came to America from Italy, said he never thought the dog’s name was a slur.

“When they said the dog’s name is Dago, I never gave it a thought,” he said.