They can be victims and be bastards.
A police dog, put in a position to hurt you, will.
A police horse out in a position to hurt you will try not to.
Drug dogs were probably the worst example I could have chosen. A better example would have been a dog used to attack people. They may have been trained and treated with various degrees of mistreatment to do so quite so enthusiastically, but they know they're hurting you.
The police horse uses what agency it has to try not to hurt you.
If someone forces you to drive a car through a crowd, you're still morally culpable if you try to hit people. If you do your best to avoid hurting anyone within the confines of what you were forced to do you're pretty much in the clear.
Considering the stakes of bastarddom are pretty low, I'm willing to judge an animal based on what it would do with its limited autonomy.
Oh, I never thought you were saying I did or didn't have to like someone or something. And I would never advocate for hurting or mistreating any animal no matter how much of a bastard it is.
I think the disconnect might be exactly how "severe" the label is. There are humans who became cops because they legitimately thought they could do good, who never did anything unjust and never were in a position of ignoring wrong doing or anything like that.
The closest thing to a moral failing being a lack of awareness of systemic justice and so on and so forth.
They're still a bastard because they're contributing to the entire thing, regardless of their lack of involvement in the specific negatives.
I don't think the dog needs punishment, just that it shouldn't be a police dog.
I'd easily agree that a dog doesn't have the same moral autonomy that a human does. I just don't think you need that to be called a bastard. Geese are often bastards. You don't hold it against the goose, but you don't forget that if given the choice that goose will nip you.
Utterly aside from the specifics: there's some research that indicates that canines do actually have capacity for a sense of morality and justice but it's limited to equal treatment so far as we can see. Not the more abstract "right or wrong action".