When Melissa Evans' dog Spotty got away, she feared she might never see him again. But she got a call from Oklahoma City Animal Welfare saying they had picked up the dog and she could get him back if she got him neutered; she agreed. But when she went to pick up Spotty, staff told her the dog had been mistakenly euthanized. "There were two dogs in this particular kennel that had come in together," said Animal Welfare Superintendent Jon Gary. "Very similar-looking dogs. Same coloring, same sex, same breed type." The other dog was scheduled to be euthanized instead of Spotty. "We went into the kennel and mistakenly pulled the wrong dog out," Gary said. "And the wrong dog was euthanized."
The post Brickbat: Dog Gone appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"That's what happens when you don't answer questions," a Prince George's County police officer said as Erica Umana's dog lay on the ground, paralyzed and bleeding out.
Minutes earlier, on a summer day in 2021, officers had shot Umana's dog, a boxer mix named Hennessy, during a chaotic confrontation inside Umana's apartment.
Now Umana and her roommates—Erika Sanchez, Dayri Benitez, and Brandon Cuevas—have filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the Prince George's County Police Department and several of its officers, saying the police had no right to enter their apartment, shoot their dog, and detain them. The lawsuit seeks over $16 million for allegedly subjecting them to excessive force, unlawful search and seizure, and false arrest.
"This case is an outrage. It is disgusting, disgraceful, and despicable," William Murphy, an attorney representing the roommates, said in a press release Monday. "These officers outright abused and mistreated our clients, lied to unlawfully break into their house, manhandled them illegally, and shot their dog. And in utter disregard for the severity of their intolerable behavior, they laughed about it."
The incident began on June 2, 2021, when Prince George's County police officers arrived at an apartment complex in Landover Hills in response to a 911 call from a woman claiming two dogs had allegedly jumped on her and bit her.
Prince George's County Cpl. Jason Ball encountered Sanchez sitting outside of the apartments, but she refused to answer any questions. Ball then threatened to arrest Sanchez for trespassing if she didn't leave. On body camera footage, Ball said into his radio that he believed Sanchez lived in the apartment complex but that he was about to arrest her anyway because she refused to answer his questions—the first of several retaliatory threats and comments from Ball.
Sanchez walked off, and Ball and his partner went to knock on the door of the apartment where Sanchez, Umana, and the other lawsuit plaintiffs lived. No one answered.
"This would be open by now, by the way, if it wasn't…," Ball said to his partner, trailing off and tapping his body camera. "I used to open them all the time."
"Times have changed," Ball's partner responded.
Instead, the officers got a master key from a maintenance worker and returned to open the door—illegally, the lawsuit alleges. The officers were also violating department policy, the lawsuit says. As The Washington Post detailed in a 2021 story on the shooting:
The general orders — the police employee manual — instruct officers to complete a case record for their supervisor if an animal is dangerous but contained. If an animal poses an immediate threat, officers are supposed to find and contain it "without endangering themselves or the public," then call animal control, according to the protocol.
If officers cannot find the animal, they are to create a case record and give it to the animal management division within 24 hours.
Department protocol also says that officers should assist animal control in enforcing animal-related laws only after a warrant has been issued.
Inside the apartment, Benitez emerged from her bedroom, shouting that the officers had no probable cause to be there. Meanwhile, Sanchez and Umana returned when they realized police were entering their apartment. However, officers blocked them from coming in. When the two women pushed their way past, the police tackled, restrained, and threatened to tase the women.
It was at this point that Hennessy slipped out of the bedroom and ran toward Umana. "Get the dog, get the dog!" one of the officers shouts. Within seconds, two officers shot the dog from behind while a third tased it.
Umana ran to the dog's side, despite officers threatening to tase her if she did not step away from it.
"I was just begging them, begging them," Umana told The Washington Post in 2021. "They just had no remorse."
Benitez called 911, complaining that officers had stormed into her apartment without a warrant.
It was during this bloody aftermath, as Umana cradled her wounded pet in her arms, that Ball said, "That's what happens when you don't answer questions."
The lawsuit claims the roommates were detained for an hour in the back of a police van before being released without being charged. Umana traveled to an animal hospital where Hennessy was being treated. The dog was alive, but permanently paralyzed. Umana chose to have it euthanized. She received an $800 bill.
According to the lawsuit, the county offered to pay the veterinary bill, but only if Umana agreed not to speak out about the shooting or sue the police department. She declined the offer.
At a press conference announcing the lawsuit on Monday, attorneys for the roommates were joined by representatives from the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland, the NAACP Maryland State Conference, and several other local activist groups, who all said that the incident was part of a long history of civil rights violations by the police department.
"Without a badge, these officers would be trespassers. Without a badge these officers would be called burglars. Without a badge, these officers would be called assailants," the Maryland NAACP's NaShona Kess said at the press conference. "With a badge and without a warrant they are trespassers. With a badge and without a warrant they are burglars and assailants."
After an internal affairs investigation, Ball and Officer Joseph Mihanda were found guilty of violating administrative charges of "conduct unbecoming an officer." The department referred the case to the local state attorney's office for possible criminal prosecution, but the office declined to prosecute.
"After reviewing all of the evidence in this matter a determination was made that actions of the officers didn't generate criminal liability because they were acting in good faith," the office told The Washington Post.
Officers are rarely disciplined for shooting dogs; supervisors almost always find that shootings are justified by departments' loose policies, which usually only require that an officer feel threatened by a dog to deploy deadly force. For example, a Reason investigation into a string of dog shootings by Detroit police discovered one officer who had killed more than 80 dogs over the course of his career. In fact, there's a whole category on Reason's website called "puppycide" documenting cases of police wantonly shooting dogs—shooting toy breeds including a vicious Pomeranian, shooting dogs at children's birthday parties, dumping dead pets in ditches and trash cans, and more.
The Prince George's County Police Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The post Maryland Roommates File Lawsuit After Police Shot Their Dog During Alleged Illegal Home Search appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>In August, a Missouri family's dog, Parker, wandered away from the family home during a violent storm. When the neighbor who found the dog called the police for help, instead of returning Parker to his family, an officer shot him and threw his body in a ditch.
According to a lawsuit filed this week by Parker's owners, Tylla and Bryan Pennington, Stoddard County, Missouri, police officer Rodger Seal arrived at Hillary Mayberry's home after she called the sheriff's office looking for assistance with Parker. Mayberry had posted earlier on Facebook about the found dog. However, instead of helping Mayberry find Parker's owners, or even taking her to a nearby shelter, Seal took the dog to a nearby wooded area and shot him.
The lawsuit claims that Parker did not immediately die after being shot. Instead, Seal waited eight minutes before firing a second shot, which killed him. Seal then disposed of Parker's body by throwing it in a ditch.
The suit argues that there was no legal justification for Seal to kill Parker. While Stoddard County has a written policy allowing officers to shoot a "dangerous, diseased, or incapacitated animal," Parker was perfectly healthy and nonaggressive.
Instead, the complaint writes that Seal "committed the felony of Animal Abuse" when he shot the dog without provocation and allowed him to lay "suffering for 8 minutes after he was shot the first time before Defendant Seal shot Parker a second time killing him."
"On information and belief," the suit adds, "Defendant Stoddard County has an unwritten policy, pattern, and practice of regularly killing dogs and disposing of them" in rural areas.
Unfortunately, this incident is far from the first time that a police officer has killed an innocent family pet—it happens so often, there's even a "puppycide" tag on Reason's website.
In November 2021, a Michigan cop shot a dog multiple times. Footage from the incident shows that the pup in question was not aggressive but was actually wagging his tail when he was shot. Last September, Detroit cops killed a woman's dog and dumped its body in a trash can. A 2016 Reason investigation showed that Detroit cops are particularly fond of killing dogs—they shot at least 25 in 2015 alone.
Last August, an Arkansas cop tried to shoot a Pomeranian—a breed that tends to weigh only 3 to 7 pounds—but missed and struck the dog's owner. After the dog's owner yelled out that she had been shot, the cop tried to tell her that her dog had actually scratched her instead.
"[Police] don't need to be dog trainers," Cynthia Bathurst, the executive director of the animal welfare group Safe Humane, told Reason in 2016. "They just need to know what to look for and defuse or control the situation with the resources available. It's the compassionate and right thing to do. It's better for community relations. And if that doesn't move them, the huge lawsuits should."
The post A Missouri Cop Shot a Family's Dog and Threw Its Body in a Ditch appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Tina Hight has sued the Columbia County, Arkansas, sheriff's office, Sheriff Mike Loe and Deputy Brian Williams after Williams shot her while trying to hit her Pomeranian dog.
The post Brickbat: Sorry, I Was Aiming at Your Dog appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Lorain, Ohio, police department says it is investigating after Officer Elliott Palmer shot and killed a family's Labrador retriever mix named Dixie. Bodycam video that started after Palmer was already on the scene shows a woman standing in a residential yard trying to control at least three dogs. One dog walked up to Palmer. But Palmer pointed at it and possibly spoke (Palmer had his bodycam muted), and it walked away. Another dog broke away from the woman and ran up to Palmer, who shot the dog and continued to fire at it as the dog limped away.
The post Brickbat: Barking Orders appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A Detroit woman is demanding answers and an apology after police shot her dog and allegedly dumped it in a neighbor's garbage can—the latest in a string of dog shootings by Detroit police that have outraged owners and led to many costly lawsuit settlements.
According to WDIV Local 4, which first reported the story, Detroit police were searching for a carjacking suspect Sunday night when an officer entered the backyard of Tiffany Lindsay. The officer peeked into a doghouse and, unsurprisingly, found Lindsay's dog Jack. The dog reportedly lunged at the officer, and it was shot and killed.
Dog shootings like this are sadly common across the United States. Just browse the "puppycide" tag on Reason's website. Some are justified and some are the result of poor training or maliciousness, but what happened next isn't in any police training manual.
The next morning, Lindsay's neighbors informed her that her pet had been dumped in their trash can.
Lindsay told the news station that officers never told her why her dog had been shot or why it was thrown away. "They didn't knock on my door and say nothing," she said.
A 2016 Reason investigation found Detroit police had a nasty habit of shooting dogs during drug raids, which had led to a series of costly lawsuits. Public records obtained by Reason showed that one officer on the department's narcotics unit had shot more than 80 dogs over the course of his career.
In 2015, the city approved a $100,000 settlement to a man after police shot his dog while it was securely chained to a fence.
In 2018, Detroit paid $225,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by Kenneth Savage and Ashley Franklin, who claimed Detroit police officers shot their three dogs while the animals were enclosed behind an 8-foot-tall fence—all so the officers could confiscate several potted marijuana plants in their backyard.
In 2019, Detroit agreed to pay $60,000 to Nikita Smith, whose three dogs were shot by a Detroit narcotics unit during a marijuana raid in 2016. That same year, Detroit police shot a family dog in front of a 9-year-old boy, and a woman filed a civil rights lawsuit alleging Detroit police yanked open her door and then shot her two dogs when they ran outside.
In 2020, the city doled out another $75,000 to settle a lawsuit over a dog shooting that the Detroit Police Department (DPD) determined was unjustified and violated department policy. Body camera footage contradicted the officer's claims that two dogs were lunging at him and barking when he shot them during a drug raid.
As for Lindsay, video shows that DPD officers returned on Monday and loaded the animal's body into a police car, but she still doesn't have answers or an apology.
"Certainly, anytime we have to put a dog down, it's not a good day for the department or for the citizen who owns it, but I just don't have enough information to give you an intelligent response," Detroit Police Chief James White told Local 4.
Many of the stories Reason reported involved allegations of Detroit police being callous, even mocking, toward people whose dogs they have shot.
"You were trying to hide it," Lindsay told the news station. "You were trying to hide it."
When asked what she had to say about that, Lindsay shrugged. "That's Detroit."
The Detroit Police Department did not immediately return a request for comment.
The post Detroit Police Shot a Woman's Dog and Allegedly Dumped It in Garbage Can appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>For Bradley Brock, his 3-year-old dog, a mastiff named Moose, was his family and his support after a serious motorcycle accident. In a span of seconds on a November night last year, a police officer in Inkster, Michigan, took all of that from Brock when the officer shot Moose multiple times as the dog approached him.
Brock says, and video appears to show, the dog wagging its tail as it trots toward the officer. Brock has now filed a federal civil rights lawsuit arguing that the shooting was an unreasonable seizure under the Fourth Amendment.
The shooting is another alleged instance of an officer misreading dog behavior and slaying a pet—a sadly common occurrence that continues to devastate families, generate public outrage, lead to officers being fired, and cost police departments hundreds of thousands of dollars in lawsuit settlements.
Brock says he called 911 on November 15 of last year after a man at a gas station pulled a gun on him. Video of the incident shows an Inkster police officer talking to Brock while Moose sits on the sidewalk a short distance away, off leash. Moose then trots over to Brock, wagging his tail and stopping to sniff a passing pedestrian, before turning and moving toward the officer.
"He was very friendly, but if anybody was around me, he wanted to check 'em out and make sure they're okay," Brock says. "That's all, like any dog."
However, the officer begins quickly backpedaling, draws his gun, and within seconds shoots the dog multiple times.
Brock, escorted by police, took Moose to an emergency veterinarian, where the dog was euthanized. The veterinarian report notes that the Inkster police left immediately after dropping Moose off and "refused to give account of what happened."
The loss of his dog crushed Brock. He had lost one of his legs in a motorcycle accident several years earlier, and he was training Moose to be his service dog. Brock says Moose was a rescue dog who was caged and abused for the first six months of his life.
"When I got him, he had no hair from the middle of his back to the tip of his tail," Brock says. "They had run over his head with a truck, and it crushed his jaw and caused him to bite the tip of his tongue off. He was highly abused, so when I got him, I healed him as much as he healed me. We were partners."
The only reason footage of the incident exists is because a security guard at a nearby marijuana dispensary captured it on video via a drone he had in the air at the time. The Inkster Police Department told local news outlets that the officer's body camera wasn't turned on, nor was the dash camera in his cruiser active.
Brock says the dispensary initially refused to give him the video, but he later ran into the security guard, Antonio Williams, by chance. Williams sympathized with Brock and handed over the footage.
"The video clearly shows the dog was not aggressive," Williams told WXYZ Detroit. "The officer pulled his weapon and I don't know how many times he fired because I was busy wondering where the bullets were going."
Williams was fired from his job for sharing the footage with Brock, but he told WXYZ that he had no regrets.
The Inkster Police Department did not respond to a request for comment for this article. However, it previously said in a statement to Detroit's WDIV Local 4: "The members of the Inkster Police Department are without question saddened by the loss of anyone's pet, and we send our sympathy to the owner, however it is incumbent of pet owners to be responsible with their animals."
Brock says he wants the police to be better trained to recognize the difference between an aggressive and friendly dog. "I get it. We live in Detroit," he says. "People have pit bulls that are aggressive, that are guarding illegal activities. That wasn't my dog."
A 2016 Reason investigation found that a Detroit narcotics unit was responsible for a string of drug raids that left dead dogs in their wake and allegations from owners that their pets had been wantonly slain.
In the years since then, the city has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars settling lawsuits stemming from those raids. In 2020, the city paid $75,000 to settle one lawsuit after body camera footage contradicted an officer's claims that two pit bulls were growling and lunging at him when he shot them.
In 2018, Detroit paid $225,000 to settle another lawsuit by a couple who claimed police officers shot their three dogs while the animals were enclosed behind an eight-foot-tall fence—just so the officers could confiscate several potted marijuana plants in their backyard. In 2015, the city approved a $100,000 settlement to a man after police shot his dog while it was securely chained to a fence.
Following viral videos of dog shootings, intense negative publicity, and hefty lawsuit payouts, many police departments have started to recognize the need to train their officers on how to deal with canines without just reaching for their guns. Reason reported in 2018 on a pilot program by the National Sheriffs' Association that uses virtual use-of-force simulators to run officers through common situations where they might encounter a dog.
"My dog was well over 10, probably 15 feet away from him when he took the first shot," Brock says. "There's no reason that he should have taken that shot at a dog that's 15 feet away and wagging his tail."
"I just want justice for my boy," says Brock. "That's all."
The post Police Officer Kills Dog for Walking Toward Him With Tail Wagging appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A family is suing a police officer in Loveland, Colorado, and the town after they say the officer needlessly shot their dog in a 2019 incident.
A civil lawsuit filed in Larimer County District Court accuses Loveland police officer Mat Grashorn of "recklessly killing" Wendy Love and her husband Jay Hamm's 14-month-old dog, a Staffordshire terrier and boxer mix named Herkimer. The lawsuit alleges that Grashorn's shooting of Herkimer was an unreasonable seizure under the Fourth Amendment and violated their constitutional rights.
On June 29, 2019, Grashorn was responding to a call from a business owner about a suspicious truck parked on the owner's commercial property when he encountered Love, Hamm, and their three dogs. The couple was making firewood deliveries that day, and according to the lawsuit, stopped in the parking lot to give the dogs some water.
Body camera footage released along with the lawsuit shows Grashorn stepping out of his police cruiser. Love and Hamm's other dog, Bubba, is sleeping on the ground but gets up and begins running toward the officer. Grashorn draws his gun on the dog, but the couple yells at the animal to come back. It pauses and turns toward its owners, but Herkimer jumps out of the truck and lopes toward Grashorn with its tail wagging. Grashorn shoots the dog. (The audio is not captured by the body camera, which retains 30 seconds of footage before it is turned on, but not sound.) Warning: graphic content below.
After the shooting, Grashorn refused to allow the distraught couple near Herkimer, ordering them to go back to their truck. When Hamm demanded to know why Grashorn had shot the dog, Grashorn yelled that he had "no way of knowing" whether Herkimer was friendly and that he "wasn't in the business to get bit."
The lawsuit says that Loveland police refused to let the couple retrieve their dog and take it to a veterinarian until a Loveland police supervisor arrived on the scene. Hamm was ticketed for having a "dangerous dog." The ticket was later dismissed by the district attorney.
Herkimer died four days after being shot. An internal review by the Loveland Police Department found the shooting was justified.
"This is yet another agonizing illustration of all that is wrong at the Loveland Police Department," Love and Hamm's attorney, Sarah Schielke, said at a press conference Wednesday. "Herkimer could have been any of our beloved pets. Dogs are our family. And he was shot dead in broad daylight. In the middle of suburbia. By the police. With no consequences to the officer whatsoever. And then found to be reasonable by his superiors. What in the actual hell is going on at the Loveland Police Department?"
Schielke also represents Karen Garner, a 73-year-old woman who filed a lawsuit in April claiming that a Loveland police officer fractured her arm and dislocated her shoulder after stopping her for allegedly shoplifting $13.88 worth of items from Walmart.
According to the lawsuit, Garner suffers from dementia and sensory aphasia, which makes it difficult for her to communicate and understand other people. Body camera footage of the June 26, 2020, incident showed the officer, Austin Hopp, stopping Garner as she was walking home and picking wildflowers. He threw Garner, disoriented and confused, to the ground after she didn't respond to his commands to stop.
Schielke later uncovered surveillance video from the Loveland Police Department showing Hopp watching the body camera footage with two other officers and joking about it. "Ready for the pop?" Hopp says to the other officer as they watch the video of him dislocating Garner's shoulder.
Hopp is now facing charges of felony assault, causing serious bodily injury, attempting to influence a public servant, and misconduct.
Last month, the city of Loveland settled a different wrongful arrest lawsuit for $290,000.
Reason has been covering sad incidents of "puppycide" like Herkimer's for decades now. In 2019, a Faulkner County, Arkansas, sheriff's deputy was fired and charged with animal cruelty after he casually shot a small dog because the owner refused to walk outside to talk to him. The shootings lead not only to devastated families and viral news stories, but expensive lawsuit settlements for cities. In 2019, St. Louis paid $775,000 to a woman whose dog was shot during a no-knock SWAT raid over an unpaid gas bill. The Detroit Police Department has settled a string of lawsuits for shooting dogs during drug raids.
The post Colorado Police Officer Sued for 'Recklessly' Shooting Family Dog appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>An Arkansas sheriff's investigator is under internal investigation for shooting a family dog last week after going to the wrong address, Little Rock news outlet KATV reports.
Faulkner County Sheriff's Office Investigator James Freeman showed up at the house of Chris Coiner last Monday and fatally shot his son's 3-year-old mixed-breed terrier, Clide. The investigator was supposed to be at the house next door. Coiner began filming as he confronted Freeman immediately after the shooting:
WARNING GRAPHIC Police officer in Arkansas shot a family's dog after going to the wrong address pic.twitter.com/IzujAlybRT
— Fifty Shades of Whey (@davenewworld_2) November 15, 2020
KATV reports:
"My daughter was coming to the door and said somebody was in the driveway," Coiner described. "Just a blue pickup, unmarked. Before I was even around the corner here, I heard a shot, and the officer had shot my dog right here in the yard for barking at him. My girlfriend watched it out the window, the dog was not attacking him, the dog was barking, in my yard, on private property."
According to Faulkner County Sheriff's Office spokesperson Captain Erinn Stone, Freeman was conducting a sex offender compliance check at 72 Autumn Hills Road. A person living there allegedly told Freeman the offender possibly lives next door.
"I asked him why he was here, and he said he was looking for somebody named Samuel at 72 Autumn Hills Road which is the next-door neighbor," said Coiner. "I didn't know this at the time, but I had found out he had already been to 72 which was the right address, so he knew he was not at the right address and he shot my dog for barking at him."
This is not the first time the Faulkner County Sheriff's Office has made headlines for shooting a dog. Last January, a Faulkner County sheriff's deputy was fired and charged with animal cruelty after he casually shot a small dog because the owner refused to walk outside to talk to him. Although the deputy was fired, the Faulkner County Sheriff's Office said he had not appeared to violate any of the department's policies.
It's unknown how many dogs police shoot each year. A Justice Department official speculated in a 2012 interview with Police magazine that the number could be as high as 10,000 a year, calling it "an epidemic." But that figure is little more than a guess.
The proliferation of social media, cell phones, and body cameras has led to numerous viral stories about police wantonly shooting dogs. There's a whole category of stories on Reason's website about "puppycide."
The shootings lead not only to devastated families and viral news stories, but expensive lawsuit settlements for cities. Last year St. Louis paid $775,000 to a woman whose dog was shot during a no-knock SWAT raid over an unpaid gas bill. The Detroit Police Department has settled a string of lawsuits for shooting dogs during drug raids.
Law enforcement groups have started to recognize that police have a problem with dogs. In 2018, the National Sheriffs' Association launched a pilot program that uses a virtual use-of-force simulator to teach officers how to read and react to normal dog behaviors.
KATV reports that the Faulkner County Sheriff's Office has not altered its policies since the dog shooting last year, and that Freeman is still on duty while under investigation.
The post Arkansas Cop Shoots Family Dog After Going to Wrong Address appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The city of Detroit has reportedly paid $75,000 to settle a civil rights lawsuit after police shot a woman's dogs during a drug raid—a shooting the Detroit Police Department (DPD) determined was unjustified and violated department policy.
Detroit resident Kira Horne filed the lawsuit last December, alleging that a Detroit police officer, Nathan Miller, violated her civil rights by shooting her dogs without cause during a November 13, 2018, narcotics raid. This, she says, was an unreasonable seizure under the Fourth Amendment.
The settlement marks at least the fourth lawsuit payout in recent years stemming from Detroit drug raids where police have been accused of wantonly shooting dogs. A 2016 Reason investigation found that Detroit police officers respond to hundreds of calls a year regarding loose and aggressive dogs, which are a serious problem in the city. But the investigation also revealed a disturbing pattern of officers, especially on the narcotics squad, shooting pets during raids.
In most of those cases, there has been no video of the incidents, leading to dueling he said/she said claims between pet owners and police. But this time, body camera footage showed exactly what happened.
"As is typical in these cases, the officer falsely reported that the dogs attacked the police in order to justify the shooting," says Horne's attorney, Chris Olson. "Thus, this case is part of a pattern of Detroit police officers wrongfully shooting dogs and then lying about it. Fortunately, in this case, body camera footage showed the truth."
Warning: The video is graphic.
The body camera footage shows several members of the Detroit Police Department's Gang Intelligence unit executing a narcotics search warrant. As Miller enters a hallway while clearing the house, a black pit bull comes out of a room and advances toward Miller before he fires his shotgun at it, mortally wounding the animal. But the dog was neither growling nor barking.
A second pit bull enters the hallway. Miller yells at it, and the dog runs back into another room before emerging again and standing next to the corpse of the first dog. It is not barking, growling, or moving toward Miller when he fires at it.
"It's a fuckin' homicide scene," one of the other Detroit police officers remarks as he surveys the bloody aftermath.
The raid resulted in the arrest of one man for possession of cocaine with intent to distribute.
In a "destruction of animal" report that Miller filed after the raid, obtained by Reason through a public records request, the officer claimed that he "observed a black pit bull and a tan pit bull showing his teeth, charging, and attempting to bite crew." In a separate incident report, Miller embellished a little more, writing that "a large black pitfall came charging at me down the hallway from the northwest bedroom. I fired two shots…neutralizing the threat. While still in the hallway, a second brown pit bull came charging down the hallway towards me."
Miller's supervising officers, all the way up the chain of command, signed off on the shooting and found that he followed department policy. But after Horne and the arrested man filed a complaint, the Detroit Police Department's Citizen Complaint Subcommittee investigated the incident. After reviewing Miller's body cam footage, it found that the video "did not show the dogs acting in an aggressive manner."
"At no time did any of the dogs charge at the officers, growl or try to bite them," the subcommittee wrote in its report. In a rare occurrence, the police department declared that the shooting was unjustified and violated the department's policies regarding dogs.
Olson has represented several other Detroit residents who have sued the police after their dogs were shot. Detroit resident Teresa Thomas filed a federal civil rights lawsuit last year alleging that two Detroit police officers illegally pulled open her door during a warrantless search and then shot her two dogs after they ran outside, killing one of them.
Last year, Detroit agreed to pay $60,000 in another dog shooting lawsuit. That suit was brought by Nikita Smith, whose three dogs were shot by a Detroit narcotics unit during a marijuana raid in 2016.
In 2018, Detroit paid $225,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by Kenneth Savage and Ashley Franklin, who claimed Detroit police officers shot their three dogs while the animals were enclosed behind an 8-foot-tall fence—all so the officers could confiscate several potted marijuana plants in their backyard.
In 2015, the city approved a $100,000 settlement to a man after police shot his dog while it was securely chained to a fence.
Destruction-of-animal reports obtained by Reason show that one officer on a Detroit Police Department unit that conducted drug raids throughout the city had shot 80 dogs over the course of his career.
"We will continue to seek justice for dog owners in Detroit," Olson says, "who suffer more shootings than anywhere else in the country, and to expose police officers lying about their unconstitutional conduct."
As regular readers of Reason know, police puppycide is far from limited to Detroit. Nor is Detroit the only city to find that the aftermath of an unjustified dog shooting can be costly. Last year St. Louis paid $775,000 to a woman whose dog was shot during a no-knock SWAT raid over an unpaid gas bill.
The Detroit Police Department and the Detroit Corporation Counsel, which represents the city in civil lawsuits, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The post Detroit Police Department Settles Another Dog Shooting Lawsuit After Video Contradicts Cop's Account appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Two Detroit police officers illegally pulled open a woman's door during a warrantless search and then shot her two dogs after they ran outside, killing one of the pets, according to a federal civil rights lawsuit filed this week.
The lawsuit, first reported by The Detroit News, claims two unnamed Detroit police officers, responding to a report of gunshots in the area, arrived at the home of Teresa Thomas on July 19, looking for a suspect. Thomas said that the suspect didn't live there and that she was alone in the house with her two dogs. She refused to allow the officers inside without a search warrant.
The lawsuit claims one of the officers then "pulled [Thomas] out of the house because she was holding the door shut at that time."
Thomas' two dogs, Tiny and Winter, "then went out the front door and around the corner to where their food bowls kept," the document continues. "Police officer Doe #2 shot both Tiny and Winter. Defendant Doe #1 laughed at Plaintiff as she tried to help her wounded animals."
Tiny died, and Winter was wounded by a bullet to the muzzle. The suit alleges that both the illegal search and the shooting of Thomas' dogs violated her Fourth Amendment rights.
The suit is the latest in a string of costly lawsuits against Detroit police for shooting dogs. Thomas' lawyer, Chris Olson, has represented several plaintiffs in similar suits against the Detroit Police Department. He says the incident is yet another case of poor training leading to a preventable shooting.
"This is an example of what not to do," Olson says. "This is an instance where the homeowner told them, 'Look, there's a dog here,' and they were trying to keep the dogs separate from the police. This particular officer opened the door. I have to believe if these officers were trained properly, they wouldn't have done that.
A 2016 Reason investigation found that Detroit police officers responded to hundreds of calls a year regarding loose and aggressive dogs, which are a serious problem in the city. This August, a loose pit bull killed a nine-year-old girl. But the investigation also revealed a disturbing pattern of Detroit police officers, especially on the narcotics squad, shooting family pets during drug raids and searches.
Earlier this year, Detroit agreed to pay $60,000 in another dog shooting lawsuit. That suit was brought by Nikita Smith, whose three dogs were shot by a Detroit narcotics unit during a marijuana raid in 2016.
Last year, Detroit paid $225,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by Kenneth Savage and Ashley Franklin, who claimed Detroit police officers shot their three dogs while the animals were enclosed behind an 8-foot-tall fence—all so the officers could confiscate several potted marijuana plants in their backyard.
In 2015, the city approved a $100,000 settlement to a man after police shot his dog while it was securely chained to a fence.
The Detroit Police Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment, but The Detroit News reports that
the department said officers had been responding to a report of shots fired on Beals, near Thomas' home.
Police said when they started an investigation there, two dogs ran in front of them. One charged at an officer, who fired two shots, striking both canines, according to the statement.
The Police Department said at the time that the incident would be investigated since it involved an officer using force.
The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals is currently considering another lawsuit by two Detroit residents, Nicole Motyka and Joel Castro, who say narcotics officers raided their house in 2016 and shot two of their pit bulls, despite the dogs being behind a barrier in the kitchen. The officers found 26 marijuana plants inside, which shouldn't have been a surprise. Castro was a state-licensed medical marijuana caregiver. Marijuana charges against the couple were later dropped.
"I don't want anything to do with the Detroit police anymore," Motyka told Reason in 2016. "You grow up being taught these are the people you're supposed to trust, and then they come in and kill your family. I have no love for them. None. They probably sleep well at night. We don't."
The post Detroit Police Sued Yet Again for Shooting a Woman's Dogs During a Warrantless Search appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Recently released body camera footage from the police department in Arlington, Texas, shows an officer fatally shooting a woman lying behind a shopping plaza after taking aim at her medium-sized, unrestrained dog.
BREAKING: Arlington PD has just released the body camera of the moments an officer fatally shot a woman while aiming at a loose dog. https://t.co/5FbeH1P6hP pic.twitter.com/rGdZUWqJ2h
— FOX 4 NEWS (@FOX4) August 2, 2019
The officer had been dispatched to perform a routine welfare check on the woman, Maggie Brooks, who was reportedly homeless and a regular at the shopping center in question. Footage shows the cop walking toward Brooks and asking her, "Are you OK?"
"Yeah, I'm fine," Brooks replies. The dog then trots toward the officer. Although the video makes it clear that the animal presented no threat, he nonetheless fires three shots toward the dog as Brooks lies mere feet away.
"Get back!" he yells at the dog, while opening fire.
"Oh my God!" Brooks screams after the officer inflicts the fatal wound. "Police shot me!"
As she cries out in agony, the officer moves back toward her and tells her to "get ahold of her dog."
At a news conference, Police Chief Will Johnson said the 30-year-old Brooks suffered a fatal wound in the "upper torso." The dog, weighing 40 pounds, was also struck and is currently in quarantine.
The officer on duty—who graduated from the academy this past February—is on administrative leave while the incident is under both criminal and departmental investigation. He underwent eight hours of training on encounters with canines prior to assuming his role.
While that training clearly didn't prepare the cop in question for the routine welfare check, he is not alone in using deadly force against animals who present no imminent danger. The Department of Justice estimates that 25 to 30 dogs are killed per day in what they call an "epidemic." As I wrote last week:
In Detroit, Michigan, 54 dogs were killed in 2017 alone. "The rise occurred at the same time Detroit is trying to fend off lawsuits from residents who say police wantonly killed their dogs during drug raids," wrote Reason's C.J. Ciaramella in September. In St. Louis County, a woman received a $750,000 settlement after a SWAT team killed her dog during a raid on her home over an unpaid gas bill.
Human bystanders are sometimes caught up in the officers' reckless behavior. A federal court recently ruled that Deputy Sheriff Matthew Vickers of Coffee County, Georgia, is protected by qualified immunity for his role in shooting a 10-year-old child in the knee while firing at a nonthreatening family dog.
Larry Hamilton, an acquaintance of Brooks, described her as a devoted caretaker to her pet. "She was a real loving person to the dog. Really caring, and you know, always made sure the dog was fed before she did," he said. "She was a good-hearted person."
The post Body Camera Footage Shows Officer Killing Woman While Firing at Nonthreatening Dog appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A police officer responding to a welfare check in Arlington, Texas, attempted to shoot a dog on the property. He killed the 30-year-old woman he was dispatched to check on instead.
When police arrived at the scene, they were initially unable to find the woman in question, but they later located her lying in a grassy area next to an unrestrained dog. According to a statement from the Arlington Police Department, the animal allegedly "began to run towards the officer while barking," prompting the man to fire multiple shots. He missed the dog and hit the woman. She was transported to a local hospital, where she was pronounced dead.
A body camera captured the incident, and the video will be included in the investigation.
American police officers have an unfortunate track record when it comes to shooting nonthreatening dogs on the job. The Department of Justice calls puppycide an "epidemic," estimating that 25 to 30 dogs are killed by cops every day. That's almost 11,000 dog deaths per year.
In Detroit, Michigan, 54 dogs were killed in 2017 alone. "The rise occurred at the same time Detroit is trying to fend off lawsuits from residents who say police wantonly killed their dogs during drug raids," wrote Reason's C.J. Ciaramella in September. In St. Louis County, a woman received a $750,000 settlement after a SWAT team killed her dog during a raid on her home over an unpaid gas bill.
And it isn't unprecedented for a cop to inflict a human casualty while fending off a nonthreatening animal. In 2014, Deputy Sheriff Matthew Vickers of Coffee County, Georgia, shot and seriously wounded a 10-year-old child after opening fire on the family's dog. The officer was in pursuit of a fugitive who had no connection to the family and had wandered onto their property. A court recently ruled that the officer is protected by qualified immunity, so the family will receive no compensation for medical bills.
The post Police Officer Shoots at Dog During Welfare Check, Kills Woman Instead appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>St. Louis County has agreed to pay $750,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by a woman whose dog was killed by police during a no-knock SWAT raid over an unpaid gas bill.
According to the lawsuit, filed by one Angela Zorich, members of the St. Louis County Police Department's Tactical Response Unit executed a search warrant on Zorich's home in April 2014 following an anonymous tip that Zorich had had gas and electric service shut off at her house, the latter of which is a violation of the county's housing code.
During the raid, police arrested Zorich and shot and killed the Zorichs' dog, a 4-year-old pit bull named Kiya.
Police argued that Kiya charged them after they entered the home, giving them no choice but to shoot it. Zorich's complaint says that Kiya made no threatening movements, and that officers shot her immediately upon entering the home. Zorich's lawsuit says that her infant grandson was in the house at the time of the raid. It also claims that an officer held a gun to her adult son Isiah's head, threatening to "put three" in him if he spoke.
Following her arrest, Zorich's home, already under foreclosure, was condemned and the family was forced to move.
"Mr. Zorich had really lived this case for five years," said Jerry Dobson, one of the attorneys who represented Zorich, to Reason. "I think she was terribly traumatized by what had happened when the SWAT team came in and shot and killed her dog and pointed semi-automatic weapons at her children."
According to neighbors, police were frequently called to the Zorich residence over domestic disputes.
In the days leading up to the April 2014 raid, police—acting on a tip that gas and electrical service had been shut off—inspected the outside of Zorich's home, marking it as a "problem property." Zorich later called the county police to try and settle the "problem property" designation.
According to her lawsuit, Zorich had a testy exchange with one Robert Rinck, an officer assigned to the county's Problem Properties unit, during which she agreed to have code inspectors come look at the inside of her home. However, Zorich said she needed to speak with her husband first so that she could arrange a time when he could be there for the inspection as well.
"It's hard to imagine when anyone would run and get a search warrant and send in a SWAT team without first at least calling the homeowner and saying 'did you talk to your husband, let's arrange a time,'" says Dobson.
Yet that's exactly what happened. The next day Rinck requested and received a search warrant for her home. Within a few hours, police were kicking down Zorich's door.
Zorich's lawsuit claims that the SWAT raid on her home was completely unnecessary given that officers had felt safe inspecting the outside of her home just a few days ago, and that she had voluntarily agreed to open her door to county inspectors—negating the need for anyone to kick it down.
Zorich's lawsuit also argues that the minor nature of the violations she was accused of should have forestalled the SWAT raid.
Indeed, if St. Louis County police are empowered to knock down a door for minor code violations, they can effectively raid a house for anything, leaving property owners and residents with little assurance that their Fourth Amendment rights mean anything at all in St. Louis County.
The chaotic nature of these raids also increases the chances of violence, given that officers, homeowners, and their animals are all thurst suddenly into a very volatile situation involving lots of guns.
Making matters worse, says Dobson, is just how little oversight is exercised over officers requesting search warrants in these cases.
"You have no supervision, no one to look at this and say 'is this a good idea that we're sending a [tactical] team to serve a search warrant for a housing code violation,'" he says.
Indeed, the overreliance on SWAT teams to perform ordinary law enforcement functions is one of the reasons cops end up shooting so many dogs in the first place.
Dobson says he hopes that the settlement he won for his client will help prevent these kinds of instances from happening again, saying the case will hopefully be "something of a wake-up call to other departments that they need to get their house in order."
This article was updated to include comments from Jerry Dobson.
The post Police Agree To Pay Woman $750,000 After Raiding Her House and Killing Her Dog Over an Unpaid Gas Bill appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A Detroit family is distraught after a police officer shot their 15-month-old dog on Friday. A 9-year-old had been walking the dogs when they got loose and took off. The boy flagged a police officer down for help retrieving the animals, but local news outlets report that the officer instead shot the dog.
Nine-year-old Elijah Hughs, the nephew of Sonya Davis, was preparing to take Davis' two dogs for a walk when they got loose and ran down the street. There are conflicting stories about what happened next, but a Detroit police officer shot Stormy, a 15-month-old pit bull mix, in the face. The family is now facing approximately $8,000 in medical bills to fix the dog's completely shattered lower jaw.
"I was devastated," Davis told The Detroit News. "She's not a vicious dog at all. … She's a sweetheart."
Detroit TV news outlet Fox 2 reports:
Elijah tells Fox 2 he was walking Stormy and their other dog Bandit Friday afternoon on Detroit's East Side.
They got loose and ran Elijah flagged down a Detroit Police car telling them his dogs got loose.
"One of the police officers jumped out the car and they shot Stormy and then she ran," he said.
Detroit Police say they had gotten a 911 call about vicious dogs in the area, when they got on scene they say Stormy charged at them.
"We don't know if the dog is friendly or not its running toward the officer and the officer have to make a split decision at that time," Captain Keeth Williams with Detroit Police said.
According to Detroit Dog Rescue (DDR), a local no-kill shelter, police left the family to deal with their grievously injured pet. The family contacted a local news station, which put them in touch with the DDR. The group is fundraising to cover the Davis' veterinary bills.
The Davis family is filing a complaint with the Detroit Police Department, which said it is investigating the incident. If the family pursues legal action, they'll join a string of civil rights lawsuits against the city for wantonly shooting dogs.
The shooting happened to occur on the same day Reason reported that Detroit agreed to pay out $60,000 in another dog shooting lawsuit brought by Nikita Smith, whose three dogs were shot by a Detroit narcotics unit during a marijuana raid in 2016.
Last year, Detroit paid $225,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by Kenneth Savage and Ashley Franklin, who claimed Detroit police officers shot their three dogs while the animals were enclosed behind an 8-foot-tall fence—all so the officers could confiscate several potted marijuana plants in their backyard.
In 2015, the city approved a $100,000 settlement to a man after police shot his dog while it was securely chained to a fence.
Last year, Reason reported that Detroit police shot 54 dogs in 2017—twice as many as Chicago, a city with roughly 2 million more people. About a third of those shootings were by the Detroit Police's Major Violators Unit, which conducts drug raids throughout the city. A previous Reason investigation found the Major Violators Unit had a nasty habit of leaving dead dogs in its wake and generating lawsuits.
While violent drug raids are responsible for many of the dog shootings, Detroit also has a large number of stray dogs and little in the way of help for police who have to deal with them. In many of the cases reviewed by Reason, officers struggled to corral aggressive dogs running loose on the street while waiting in vain for animal control to arrive.
But in other instances, Detroit residents said their dogs were shot with little hesitation. For example, in May 2015, local country singer Alison Lewis was playing with her cattle dog mix Millie in the open field where the old Tigers Stadium used to stand when the dog ran up to a police officer. The officer shot Lewis' dog in the face. Police described it as a jumping, barking pit bull that charged the officer, according to the Detroit Free Press. "That's absolutely not true," Lewis told local news channel WXYZ. Detroit settled with Lewis for $8,000.
"What we do know is Detroit Police are asked to do too much and they're not trained to work with all dogs," Detroit Dog Rescue wrote on Facebook. "The city STILL needs adequate animal control officers, vehicles, extended hours, and a facility."
Detroit is a particularly notable example of a national problem. Exactly how many dogs are shot by police every year is unknown, but there have been so many that there are databases and Facebook groups dedicated to tracking the phenomenon. In January, an Arkansas cop was fired after video showed him casually shooting a 9-pound dog. Reason has a whole category for "puppycide" stories. Last year, I reported on a new pilot program to train police officers how to read dog behavior, a tacit acknowledgment that police have a dog problem.
Until such training is more widespread, stories like this, and expensive lawsuits, will continue to play out.
The post Detroit Cop Shoots Family Dog in Front of 9-Year-Old appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The City of Detroit will pay out $60,000 to settle a federal civil rights lawsuit by a woman who says police wantonly shot and killed her three dogs during a marijuana raid three years ago.
The plaintiff, Nikita Smith, claimed in a 2016 lawsuit that officers from Detroit's Major Violators Unit acted as a "dog death squad" when they executed a narcotics search warrant on her house for a suspected marijuana offense, shooting three of her pit bulls, including one that was behind a closed bathroom door. Extremely graphic photos entered into evidence in the case show bullet holes riddling the outside of the door and the dog dead inside the bathroom.
Smith was arrested for marijuana possession, but the charges were later dropped when officers failed to appear in court.
The settlement is the latest in a string of costly payouts for Detroit due to dog shootings during drug raids. It also set new precedent in Fourth Amendment law. Detroit tried to argue that, since Smith's dogs were unlicensed, in violation of Detroit's municipal code, she had no legitimate property interest in them under the Fourth Amendment. The court rejected this argument.
Smith's attorney, Chris Olson, calls the decision "a milestone in police-dog shooting cases that continue to plague the United States.
"The decision was significant because it denies police a 'get out of jail free card' if the deceased dog is later discovered to have been unlicensed," he continues. "The decision is especially significant because the vast majority of dogs are unlicensed. The upshot is that the Fourth Amendment prohibits police officers from shooting dogs where the shooting is more intrusive than necessary, and citizens do not have to pay a dog license fee to enjoy their Fourth Amendment rights."
A 2016 Reason investigation found that the department's Major Violators Unit, which conducts drug raids across the city, has a nasty habit of leaving dead dogs in its wake and generating civil rights lawsuits. A follow-up investigation found that Detroit police shot 54 dogs in 2017, twice as many as Chicago.
Last year, Detroit paid $225,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by Kenneth Savage and Ashley Franklin, who claimed Detroit police officers shot their three dogs while the animals were enclosed behind an 8-foot-tall fence—all so the officers could confiscate several potted marijuana plants in the backyard.
In 2015, the city approved a $100,000 settlement to a man after police shot his dog while it was securely chained to a fence.
One officer involved in the Smith raid has shot 80 dogs over the course of his career, according to "destruction of animal" reports filed by Detroit police officers in 2017 and obtained by Reason. Two other officers involved in the Smith raid testified in depositions that they had shot "fewer than 20" and "at least 19" dogs over the course of their careers.
Smith's case was also an unprecedented test of the Fourth Amendment as it applies to pets. In such cases, police departments typically argue that an officer's actions were reasonable under the circumstances—and courts give much deference to those arguments. Smith's case appears to be the first time federal courts had considered the question of whether unlicensed pets are protected by the Fourth Amendment.
A U.S. District Court judge agreed with the city, dismissing Smith's lawsuit in 2017. "When a person owns a dog that is unlicensed, in the eyes of the law it is no different than owning any other type of illegal property," the judge ruled. But the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed and remanded the lower court's ruling against Smith last year. The Sixth Circuit declared that not only was Smith entitled to some process under Michigan law before her dogs were "seized" (i.e. killed), but that her dogs, even if unlicensed, were still protected from unreasonable seizure under the Fourth Amendment.
"Just as the police cannot destroy every unlicensed car or gun on the spot, they cannot kill every unlicensed dog on the spot," the appeals court writes.
The case was kicked back to the lower court, but instead of continuing to trial, Detroit decided this week to settle.
A similar lawsuit is still pending in federal court in the case of Joel Castro and Nicole Motyka, who say narcotics officers raided their house and shot two of their pitbulls, despite the dogs being behind a barrier in the kitchen. The officers found 26 marijuana plants inside, which shouldn't have been a surprise. Castro was a state-licensed medical marijuana caregiver.
Marijuana charges against the couple were later dropped.
The Detroit Police Department and the Detroit Law Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The post Detroit Will Pay Out $60,000 to Woman Whose Dogs Were Shot on a Marijuana Raid appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Update: the Faulkner County Sheriff's Office announced in a Facebook post Saturday night that, although he did not appear to violate any department policies, the deputy responsible for the shooting has been fired.
Graphic video released Friday show's a sheriff's deputy in Faulkner County, Arkansas casually shooting a small dog after the owner refused to walk outside of his yard to talk to the deputy, in what the owner says was an act of retaliation.
According to local news outlet NEA Report, the Faulkner County Sheriff's Office responded to a call of an aggressive dog in the town of Conway. When deputy Keenan Wallace arrived outside of Conway resident Doug Canady's house, Canady refused to walk out to the sidewalk to talk to him.
"OK, I'm going to come to you, and if your dog gets aggressive, I'm going to shoot it," Wallace responds in cell phone video captured by Canady.
The dog in question was more chihuahua than pit bull, but nevertheless, Wallace strode onto the lawn, and when the small animal started yapping at him from several feet away, he shot it in the face.
Watch the video below:
The dog, somewhat miraculously, survived with a shattered jaw. A GoFundMe page to raise money for the animal's veterinary bills has already exceeded its goal.
Arkansas outlet KATV reports the deputy has been placed on paid administrative leave while the sheriff's office investigates the shooting. The deputy is a K-9 handler.
Reason has been reporting on egregious incidents of police shooting dogs for years now. As I wrote last September, reporting on a new pilot program to train officers how to read dog behavior and avoid shooting them:
[T]he proliferation of video technology and social media has led to local stories of dog shootings going viral and ricocheting around the country. There's a whole category of stories on Reason's website called "puppycide." For example, there was the time last year that a Louisiana cop shot a 12-pound dog and then allegedly told the family it was a "shame" he "had to waste that bullet because it's a really expensive bullet." Or the NYPD officer who shot a woman's dog seconds after it slipped through the door and walked toward him wagging its tail. Or the Oklahoma cop who used a high-power rifle to shoot a dog through a fence during a five-year-old's birthday party. Or there was the time in 2012 that a SWAT team in St. Paul executed a wrong-door raid, shot the family dog, and then allegedly forced three handcuffed children to sit next to their dead pet.
Just how many dogs a year are shot by police is not known or tracked in any systematic way. A Justice Department official speculated in a 2012 interview with Police magazine that the number could be as high as 10,000 a year, calling it "an epidemic," but that figure is little more than a guess. A 2012 study by the National Canine Research Council estimated that half of all intentional police shootings involved dogs. Public records obtained by Reason showed Detroit police shot 54 dogs last year. Chicago police shot or shot at 700 dogs over the last decade, according to the Chicago Tribune.
But the above video might be one of the most malicious and inexcusable instances caught on camera, besides maybe the time a Detroit cop was caught on dashcam video executing a dog while it was chained to a fence.
To the extent that the dog posed any threat to the sheriff's deputy, there was no attempt, at least in the video, to resolve the situation with anything other than lethal force. The deputy didn't ask the Canady to restrain the dog. He didn't attempt to use a less-than-lethal alternative, like the taser he was armed with and which he subsequently drew on Canady. He simply pulled his gun and shot to kill.
The post Video: Arkansas Cop Casually Shoots a 9-pound Dog appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A federal appeals court ruled today that Detroit police didn't have carte blanche to shoot a woman's dogs during a drug raid simply because they weren't licensed.
The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed and remanded a lower court ruling in the case of Nikita Smith, who filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the Detroit Police Department after a narcotics raid left three of her dogs dead. A federal judge dismissed Smith's lawsuit last year, ruling that her dogs, because they were unlicensed, amounted to "contraband" under the Fourth Amendment.
In its ruling, the Sixth Circuit declared that not only was Smith entitled to some process under Michigan law before her dogs were "seized" (read: killed), but that her dogs, even if unlicensed, were still protected from unreasonable seizure under the Fourth Amendment.
"By guaranteeing process to dog owners before their unlicensed dogs are killed, Michigan law makes clear that the owners retain a possessory interest in their dogs," the appeals court wrote. "This is particularly so in the context of everyday property that is not inherently illegal, such as some drugs, but instead is subject to jurisdiction-specific licensing or registration requirements, such as cars or boats or guns. Just as the police cannot destroy every unlicensed car or gun on the spot, they cannot kill every unlicensed dog on the spot."
The case is the first time federal courts have considered whether an unlicensed pet—in violation of city or state code—is protected property under the Fourth Amendment. Courts have previously established that pets are protected from unreasonable search and seizure under the Fourth Amendment.
"Today's opinion is enormously important because, as a practical matter, the vast majority of dogs are not licensed and police shoot dogs every day in a this country. The police-dog-shooting problem is especially bad in the City of Detroit," Smith's lawyer Chris Olson says. "Had the Court affirmed the district court's decision, police officers in Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee could summarily execute any dog without recourse in the event that the officers, like the defendants in this case, later discovered that the dog was not licensed. The opinion establishes that pet owners' Fourth Amendment rights do not depend on a license. More importantly, the opinion foreclosed a post hoc 'get out of jail free card' for police officers that unreasonably shoot dogs every day in this country."
Smith's lawsuit characterized the police as a "dog death squad" and claimed officers shot one of her pets through a closed bathroom door. Graphic photos from the raid on Smith's house showed one dog laying dead in the blood-soaked bathroom.
In such cases, police departments typically argue that an officer's actions were reasonable under the circumstances—and courts give much deference to those arguments. But in Smith's case, the City of Detroit also adopted a novel legal argument: that since Smith's dogs were unlicensed, she didn't have a legitimate property interest in them and therefore could not bring a Fourth Amendment claim against the officers. Lawyers for Detroit compared Smith to a minor holding an alcoholic beverage.
A U.S. District Court judge agreed. "When a person owns a dog that is unlicensed, in the eyes of the law it is no different than owning any other type of illegal property," U.S. District Judge George Caram Steeh ruled last year.
But in another Fourth Amendment lawsuit—brought by Nicole Motyka and Joel Castro, whose two dogs were shot by Detroit police during a marijuana raid—a different federal judge came to the opposite conclusion, ruling that Detroit's argument was "misplaced." Motyka's lawsuit has been on hold awaiting today's Sixth Circuit opinion.
Smith and Motyka's cases are part of a string of lawsuits that have been filed against the Detroit Police Department for dog shootings over the past two years. A Reason investigation last year found the department's Major Violators Unit, which conducts drug raids in the city, has a track record of leaving dead dogs in its wake.
Earlier this year, Detroit paid $225,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by Kenneth Savage and Ashley Franklin, who claimed Detroit police officers shot their three dogs while the animals were enclosed behind an 8-foot-tall fence—all so the officers could confiscate several potted marijuana plants in the backyard.
The post Court: Police Can't Shoot Unlicensed Dogs With Impunity appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>HARFORD COUNTY, MARYLAND — Sheriff's deputies Terry Lindsey and Diana Ciaramellano are walking into a backyard in a residential neighborhood, responding to a tripped burglar alarm, when a mid-sized dog runs out to see who has traipsed onto its masters' property. The dog barks and growls at the deputies from about 15 feet away, every bit of its body language conveying a clear message: LEAVE.
Deputy Lindsey yells at the dog to go away while unclipping the pepper spray from his belt with his left hand. To his right, Ciaramellano unholsters her gun, in case Lindsey's pepper spray doesn't work. She could reach for her taser, but a dog is a small, fast-moving target from straight ahead, and the prongs the weapon fires are finicky.
The dog ignores the commands and stands its ground. What happens next in this kind of situation could be either another routine day for the Harford County Sheriff's Department or end up as a major lawsuit, complete with local, maybe even national, headlines: "Maryland Cops Kill Family Dog in Backyard."
The dog charges forward, and Lindsey fires the pepper spray. It works. The animal yelps and retreats. The encounter probably takes fewer than 10 seconds.
The large projector screens surrounding the deputies go blank. They are standing in a big, dark room on the second floor of the Harford County Sheriff's Department in front of a VirTra use-of-force simulator—a high-tech video tool that trains deputies how to respond to real-life situations in real time. The guns, tasers, and spray canisters are all modified with lasers that the projector screens detect and react to.
The simulator can hold hundreds of different live-action video scenarios, from active shooters to domestic violence calls to traffic stops—each one with several branching options that an operator at a computer can choose from, depending on how the officer responds—but these Harford County deputies are among the first in the country to use it to learn how to deal with dogs.
The initiative is the brainchild of the National Sheriffs' Association (NSA), a nonprofit group that represents sheriffs across the country, and it's part of an increasing recognition by law enforcement that it has a problem with dogs. Reason travelled to the Harford County Sheriff's Department for a demonstration of how officers are being trained to fix it.
Over the past decade, countless stories of police shootings of dogs have sparked public outrage and led to huge lawsuits against departments. But NSA deputy executive director John Thompson says police officers typically receive little to no training on how to deal with dogs, beyond using lethal force, despite the near-guarantee that they will encounter one at some point in the course of their duties.
"I'm a perfect example," Thompson, now retired from law enforcement, says. "I would have just shot a dog if he came at me biting and barking and snapping. It's just what we did. It was taught to us. You neutralize the problem. It was an acceptable practice in the older days and still seems to be across the country in many agencies."
The NSA says additional pilot programs are being planned in Orange County, Florida, and Oakland County, Michigan. The group is also working with the Justice Department's Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program to develop a comprehensive course for police to learn how to handle and deescalate canine encounters.
"We identified that this was a problem and created this training so we could keep officers safe, pets safe, agencies from paying out multi-million dollar lawsuits, and honestly, so we can keep the relationship between police and community a whole lot better, because it's just rampant," Thompson continues. "Every day you hear of an officer shooting a dog. It's not because they're crazy, warmongering people who want to shoot a dog, it's just they've never been trained or told different."
The results of that lack of training can be devastating for families — and very, very expensive for cities. Detroit, for example, paid out $225,000 earlier this year to settle a lawsuit by a couple alleging police officers shot their dogs from behind an 8-foot-tall fence during a marijuana raid. Last year a jury awarded a Maryland family a whopping $1.26 million in a dog shooting lawsuit.
These lawsuits are a relatively recent development that stemmed from a 2005 ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. In that case, the federal appeals court declared that the unreasonable seizure (that is, killing) of a dog by police was a violation of the Fourth Amendment, and the city of San Jose was forced to pay out nearly $1 million to the families of two members of Hell's Angels whose dogs were shot by police during the execution of a search warrant.
Since then, the proliferation of video technology and social media has led to local stories of dog shootings going viral and ricocheting around the country. There's a whole category of stories on Reason's website called "puppycide." For example, there was the time last year that a Louisiana cop shot a 12-pound dog and then allegedly told the family it was a "shame" he "had to waste that bullet because it's a really expensive bullet." Or the NYPD officer who shot a woman's dog seconds after it slipped through the door and walked toward him wagging its tail. Or the Oklahoma cop who used a high-power rifle to shoot a dog through a fence during a five-year-old's birthday party. Or there was the time in 2012 that a SWAT team in St. Paul executed a wrong-door raid, shot the family dog, and then allegedly forced three handcuffed children to sit next to their dead pet.
Just how many dogs a year are shot by police is not known or tracked in any systematic way. A Justice Department official speculated in a 2012 interview with Police magazine that the number could be as high as 10,000 a year, calling it "an epidemic," but that figure is little more than a guess. A 2012 study by the National Canine Research Council estimated that half of all intentional police shootings involved dogs. Public records obtained by Reason showed Detroit police shot 54 dogs last year. Chicago police shot or shot at 700 dogs over the last decade, according to the Chicago Tribune.
Several states now mandate some form of dog training for police, following incidents and lawsuits like these. Colorado passed the Dog Protection Act in 2013. In Texas, the state legislature mandated dog training for police thanks to a three-year effort by Cindy Bolling, whose Border Collie mix was shot by a police officer in 2012. The Chicago Police Department says its seen a 67 percent drop in dog shootings over the past three years thanks to better training.
The federal Justice Department has also taken some steps to try to teach officers how to handle dogs. Dog trainer Brian Kilcommon produced a series of videos several years ago for the COPS program to train local and state officers on how to read dog behavior and respond to it appropriately. However, those videos were no replacement for hands-on training, nor were they mandatory.
"We have a lot of [departments] becoming proactive," Thompson says, "but unfortunately, and I hate to say it, it usually takes an incident for them to open their eyes and see it."
The Harford County Sheriff's Department would like to stay ahead of the curve. Department spokesperson Cristie Hopkins says it hasn't had a dog shooting incident, but all of its deputies are going through the program.
In another training scenario, Deputies Lindsey and Ciaramellano are put into a family living room to respond to a domestic disturbance. As a couple explains they were just having an argument, a dog bounds around the corner and starts barking. "Sir, can you put your dog away?" Lindsey and Ciaramellano repeatedly ask the man on the screen, warily keeping their hands near their utility belts, until the owner eventually complies.
The operator of the VirTra system can change the dog's behavior, and even the type of dog, from large and friendly to small and aggressive. Depending on what the deputies do, the operator can change the dog owners' reactions as well. For example, the couple in the above scenario will, quite understandably, get irate if one of the deputies draws their gun.
"If I pull out a firearm in your home, you're going to get upset," the VirTra operator, Corporal Greg Young, explains. The system, he says, is more of a tool for judgement training than a shooting gallery simulator.
The system is also loaded with videos demonstrating typical dog behavior and body language—for example, what a friendly, excited dog looks like running toward you, as opposed to an aggressive dog. In many of the more egregious examples of dog shootings, officers mistake or simply ignore the dog's behavioral cues before using lethal force.
The VirTra simulator is a big, expensive piece of equipment—$150,000 to $300,000, depending on the model—and not every agency will be able to afford one, or probably even have space for one. If there's any downside to the program, it might be in the funding models. The Harford County Sheriff's VirTra simulator, as sign outside the training room proudly states, was paid for entirely with asset forfeiture funds from drug cases, which, it must be noted, have their own set of civil liberties problems. And while training beat police how to deal with a dog may defuse many situations, a major issue is the rise in volatile SWAT raids, which put heavily armed police in direct confrontation with now-ubiquitous dogs. The use of SWAT teams has risen from around 3,000 deployments per year in 1980 to as high as 80,000 a year currently.
But shooting fewer dogs overall is a popular goal, and odds are the simulator is less costly in every sense than killing a family pet.
"Society is changing, and dogs have value now," Thompson says. "In the old days it wasn't the same. Now dogs are part of people's families. My dogs are my family, they're just like my kids. We as a law enforcement profession have to understand that change. Again, no officer should be put in a position to get hurt, and we're not saying it's never going to happen. There's going to be cases where you're going to have to shoot the dog—you just don't have a choice—but when you train and plan, the outcome is going to be better than if you go in with no training."
The post Cops Kill Lots of Dogs. This Simulator Trains Them Not To. appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>As lawsuits pile up against police departments for shooting family pets, a national police group is using a high-tech simulator to teach law officers how to read canine behavior.
For full text and links, read Cops Kill Lots of Dogs. This Simulator Trains Them Not To. Video edited and produced by Meredith Bragg. Camera by Meredith and Austin Bragg.
Subscribe to our YouTube channel.
Like us on Facebook.
Follow us on Twitter.
Subscribe to our podcast at iTunes.
Music: "Cylinder Two" by Chris Zabriskie is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
Source: http://chriszabriskie.com/cylinders/
Artist: http://chriszabriskie.com/
The post This Simulator Was Built to Stop Cops From Shooting Dogs appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Detroit police officers shot 54 dogs last year, according to public records obtained by Reason. That's a marked increase over the number reported by the department in 2016 and 2015, and more than twice as many as Chicago, a city with roughly 2 million more people.
The rise occurred at the same time Detroit is trying to fend off lawsuits from residents who say police wantonly killed their dogs during drug raids. Such incidents, given the grim moniker "puppycide," regularly make local and national headlines across the country, and in recent years they've cost cities hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal settlements.
In response, several states have passed laws mandating new training, and police departments have begun teaching officers how to properly read canine behavior. Chicago police, for instance, shot 24 dogs last year, according to the Chicago Tribune. The number of dogs shot by Chicago police has been steadily falling—67 percent over the past three years, the city says—and officials attribute it to better training.
Detroit, meanwhile, went from 25 dog shootings in 2015 to more than twice that in 2017, although several reports were missing from previous records provided by the city.
There are, of course, vast differences between cash-strapped Detroit and other major U.S. cities. In 23 of those shootings, Detroit police were responding to reports of aggressive dogs running loose on the street, sometimes menacing and attacking residents. According to city data, Detroit's 911 service received 5,999 animal complaints and vicious animal reports in 2017. In one case, a police officer saved a child who was being mauled by two pit bulls. Officers sometimes tried to lure dogs with food and treats or use a control stick, according to police reports. In others, they waited in vain for animal control before taking the situation into their own hands.
But more than one-third of those dog shootings involved a Detroit narcotics unit that has been at the center of numerous media reports and costly lawsuits.
A 2016 Reason investigation found that the Detroit Police Department's Major Violators Unit, which conducts hundreds of drug raids a year in the city, had a nasty habit of leaving dead dogs in its wake.
One officer had killed 69 dogs over the course of his career, public records showed. That officer has now shot 80 dogs, according to "destruction of animal" reports filed by Detroit police officers in 2017 and obtained by Reason.
Of the 54 dogs destroyed by the department in 2017, 19 were killed during drug raids conducted by the Major Violators Unit. That's more animal shootings than the entire Los Angeles Police Department performed—14 total—in 2016, the latest year for which summary statistics of LAPD use-of-force incidents are available.
The Major Violators Unit was responsible for an April 26, 2017, narcotics raid on Detroit resident Renee Attles' house that ended with her pit bull being shot dead. Speaking to a local television news channel, Attles said the police stormed into her home and killed her dog during a wrong-house drug raid:
"I am so hurt," said Renee Attles. "You all you don't understand, I am so freaking hurt. That was my dog."
Renee Attles says she ran out to her sister's car to decide where they were going to celebrate their deceased mother's birthday. All of a sudden Detroit police stormed her Ryan Street home.
"I said what do you want," she said. "They handcuffed me and her sister at her car before we even got right there. All I heard was pop, pop, pow. Just like that. I told them let me get my dog."
The only drug confiscated from the scene was a small bottle of Attles' medical marijuana.
Another destruction of animal report shows that several hours earlier that same day, the same Major Violators Unit crew executed another narcotics search warrant on a house a mile and a half away and shot another pitbull. Again, the only drug recovered was marijuana.
This February, the Detroit City Council approved a $225,000 settlement to Kenneth Savage and Ashley Franklin. The couple filed a federal civil rights lawsuit last July against the city and several Detroit police officers, alleging the officers shot Savage and Franklin's three dogs while the animals were enclosed behind an 8-foot-tall fence—all so the officers could confiscate several potted marijuana plants in the backyard.
In 2015, the city of Detroit approved a $100,000 settlement to a man after police shot his dog while it was securely chained to a fence.
Two other federal civil rights lawsuits stemming from Detroit drug raids are currently being considered by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. In one, Detroit resident Nikita Smith alleges that narcotics officers shot her three pitbulls, including one that was secured behind a bathroom door. Smith was initially charged with a marijuana offense, but the charges were dismissed when police failed to appear at her court hearing.
In the second lawsuit, Nicole Motyka and Joel Castro say narcotics officers raided their house and shot two of their pitbulls, despite the dogs being behind a barrier in the kitchen. The officers found 26 marijuana plants inside, which shouldn't have been a surprise. Castro was a state-licensed medical marijuana caregiver. Marijuana charges against the couple were later dropped.
"I don't want anything to do with the Detroit police anymore," Motyka told Reason in an interview. "You grow up being taught these are the people you're supposed to trust, and then they come in and kill your family. I have no love for them. None. They probably sleep well at night. We don't."
To try and combat these lawsuits, the city of Detroit has adopted the novel legal argument that, if a dog is unlicensed, as in Smith's case, it is considered "contraband" and not protected from unreasonable police seizure—read: killing—under the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution.
Two lower federal judges have come to opposite conclusions on the issue. One dismissed Smith's case, ruling that her unlicensed dogs amounted to contraband. The other federal judge rejected Detroit's argument in Motyka's lawsuit and ruled that the couple's unlicensed dog was still legitimate property.
The Sixth Circuit Court now has the unenviable task of determining whether a pet's property status lies in its owner's compliance with city regulations, and if that means a police officer can shoot it with impunity.
The Detroit Police Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment. However, in an interview last March with a local news channel, Detroit Police Assistant Chief James White defended the department from charges that it is needlessly shooting dogs.
"This isn't Fluffy the family pet in many instances," White told the news station. "Door comes off the hinges. There's pandemonium. People are running. Perpetrator, in many instances, has a weapon himself, can start shooting. Sometimes the dog is used as a tactic to get the advantage over the officers, and I just don't think it would be acceptable to an officer to put their life at risk to try to stop a dog from attacking them during a drug raid."
Officers were found in compliance with department regulations in every single destruction of animal report reviewed by Reason.
As I've written several times, better police training on how to read dogs' body language would help in some cases, but these stories will inevitably continue as long as the Detroit police continue to perform aggressive drug raids on a daily basis.
The lawsuits will inevitably continue, too.
The post Detroit Police Shot 54 Dogs Last Year—Twice as Many as Chicago appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The U.S. government says it is not responsible for any damages from a cyanide device planted by the Department of Agriculture that sent a 14-year-old Idaho boy to the hospital and killed his dog. The devices are used to kill coyotes and other predators. A lawsuit filed by the family says an Agriculture Department employ told law enforcement the device was placed in error on land managed by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.
The post Brickbat: Not Our Fault appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Chicago police have shot or tried to shoot more than 700 dogs since 2008, according to a Chicago Sun-Times investigation. The paper found none of those shootings resulted in discipline against the officers, even when courts found the shooting wrongful and the city had to pay damages to the dog's owner.
The post Brickbat: Dog Gone appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The city of Detroit will pay $225,000 to settle a civil rights lawsuit stemming from a 2016 marijuana raid that left three dogs shot to death by police.
The Detroit City Council approved the settlement this February to Kenneth Savage and Ashley Franklin, who filed a federal lawsuit against the city and three Detroit police officers last July. The lawsuit alleged the officers shot Savage and Franklin's three dogs while the animals were enclosed behind an 8-foot-tall fence—all so the officers could confiscate several potted marijuana plants in the backyard.
"As far as I know this is the largest settlement of this kind that the city of Detroit has made," says Chris Olson, the attorney for Savage and Franklin who was represented plaintiffs in several other dog shooting lawsuits. "I think it was very serious matter, and the city's settlement reflects that."
Detroit has been sued multiple times over the past few years for police shootings of dogs. In 2016, the council approved a $100,000 settlement to a man after police shot his dog while it was securely chained to a fence.
A 2016 Reason investigation found that the Detroit Police Department's Major Violators Unit, which conducts hundreds of drug raids a year in the city, had a nasty habit of leaving dead dogs in its wake.
One officer had killed 69 dogs over the course of his career, public records obtained by Reason showed. That officer is now up to 73 kills, according to the most recent records.
Reason reported on Savage and Franklin's suit after it was filed last summer:
According to a search warrant affidavit, a Detroit police officer, while investigating an unrelated matter, observed several marijuana plants outdoors at the home of Savage, Franklin, and their son.
Two days later, eight Detroit police officers arrived at the house. Police were aware Savage and Franklin had a permit to grow medical marijuana, but the plants were in violation because they were visible outside, the search warrant affidavit said.
When Franklin showed police her marijuana paperwork and demanded to see a search warrant, an officer responded, "If you keep asking for a warrant, we are gonna kill those dogs and call child protective services to pick up your kid," the lawsuit says.
Officers detained Franklin and searched the house, but could not get to the marijuana plants because of the dogs. They initially called animal control but decided to destroy the animals, the lawsuit says. Officers shot and killed one dog through the fence, broke into the backyard enclosure, and fatally shot the other two. Animal control arrived ten minutes later.
As I've written before, while better training and policies for handling dogs might stop some of these incidents, until Detroit changes the way it prosecutes the drug war these shootings are almost guaranteed to continue, along with very expensive lawsuits and payouts.
Rather than scale back the armed drug raids it conducts throughout the city on a daily basis, Detroit has dug in and fought back against the lawsuits by advancing a novel legal argument: that if a dog isn't properly licensed with the city, it is "contraband" for the purposes of the Fourth Amendment, and therefore its owner does not have a constitutionally protected interest in it.
Last August, a federal judge dismissed a civil rights lawsuit against several Detroit police officers who shot and killed Nikita Smith's three pit bulls during a 2016 marijuana raid.
Although U.S. District Court Judge George Caram Steeh found that Smith's lawsuit would have been dismissed even if she had a cognizable interest in the dogs, he wrote that, "When a person owns a dog that is unlicensed, in the eyes of the law it is no different than owning any other type of illegal property or contraband."
The case was the first time a federal court considered the question of whether an unlicensed dog, in violation of a city ordinance, is protected by the Fourth Amendment. Smith's case is now being appealed at the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, where oral arguments are scheduled for April.
However, earlier this year another U.S. district court judge rejected the city's argument and allowed a similar lawsuit to proceed.
Nicole Motyka and Joel Castro sued several Detroit police officers in 2016 after two of their dogs were shot during a marijuana raid. According to the lawsuit, police killed the dogs from behind a barrier while Castro was on the ground shouting, "All I have is weed. Don't kill my dogs."
The city argued that one of Motyka's dogs was unlicensed, and she therefore had no property interest in it. In his opinion, U.S. District Judge Arthur Tarnow wrote that Detroit's argument "is misplaced for several reasons."
"Nowhere in Michigan's Dog Law is there language that 1) deprives a dog owner of her possessory interest in her dog simply because the dog is unlicensed, and/or 2) authorizes the killing of a dog by virtue of the fact that it's unlicensed," he wrote.
The post Detroit to Pay $225,000 After Cops Shoot Three Dogs in Marijuana Raid appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>"If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog," goes an old saying mistakenly attributed to Harry S. Truman. In fact, Truman once gave away a cocker spaniel puppy that had been given to him, earning him the enmity of dog-lovers across the country.
Lawmakers in Virginia will face a slightly different test of their sympathies this year when the General Assembly takes up numerous animal-welfare bills.
Among them is a measure (SB 28) proposed by Republican state Sen. Bill Stanley, which would prohibit giving state funds to any organization that conducts "medically unnecessary" research on animals that causes "significant pain or distress." The bill was prompted by revelations about experiments at the Hunter Holmes McGuire VA Medical Center that induced heart attacks in dogs and puppies and forced them to run on treadmills.
"Some of the experiments are known to inflict severe pain in the dogs and puppies—some are as young as 6 months—while withholding pain relief," a Times-Dispatch story reported in October.
Stanley also has introduced SB 32, which would create a state database listing Virginia residents convicted of felony cruelty to animals. The list would be publicly available—and therefore helpful to those who offer rescued animals for adoption. Republican Sen. Richard Stuart has introduced the same measure under a different bill number, SB 212.
Democratic Del. John Bell is introducing a measure (HB 646) to restrict tethering—i.e., tying a dog up outside. Last year Bell introduced a broader measure that was killed in subcommittee on a voice vote, after some frankly ludicrous objections (e.g., what about sled dogs?).
This year's more narrowly tailored bill prohibits leaving animals tethered during freezing or dangerously hot weather, when the owner is off the property, and at night—and it makes exceptions for work animals. It also prohibits certain types of tethers, such as those that are too short, or heavy chains.
As one animal-welfare advocate pointed out, this still lets owners leave animals penned up in small enclosures such as chain-link cages, exposed to bitter cold or punishing heat. But it's a step forward—the modest sort of step most likely to pass a legislature that prefers incremental change to the radical kind.
Democratic Del. Mark Levine has introduced HB 425, which forbids people convicted of animal cruelty to own companion animals, and requires them to attend anger-management or similar treatment unless a court finds they no longer present a danger to animals or to others.
Another measure (HB 593), introduced by Del. Wendy Gooditis, creates a felony offense when someone who has been convicted of animal cruelty in the past five years kills a horse through cruelty or malicious neglect.
Other measures address the business end of animal welfare. For instance, Democratic Del. Jennifer Boysko has introduced HB 270, which lets localities prevent pet shops from selling animals from breeders. Democratic Del. Dawn Adams (who beat Manoli Loupassi in the 68th District and who will become the state's first openly lesbian delegate) has introduced HB 713, which prohibits commercial dog breeders from keeping dogs in cages with exposed wire floors. A couple of measures (HB 79 and HB 94) require boarding establishments to ensure that an employee is present during group play.
There are still other measures—such as ones forbidding dogs from riding on your lap while you drive (SB 97) and allowing pets in wineries (HB 286). Space prevents an exhaustive recitation of them all, but animal-welfare groups such as the SPCA will be happy to give you a rundown. The ones mentioned above, however, probably qualify as the most important.
It's worth noting legislators don't often pull ideas for new legislation out of thin air: Most bills are prompted—by a constituent's request, or a news article, or concerns raised by state agencies, the business community, or nonprofits.
That does not make all legislation, ipso facto, worthy of passage: Just because the umbrella industry asks the state to ban ponchos doesn't mean it should. But animal-welfare legislation often is driven by necessity. (For a couple of cases of dogs left out in the recent cold snap, e.g., go to goo.gl/iC8ViW and goo.gl/W8aDi1.)
If there's one bill missing from the list, it's a measure to address the all-too-richly-documented problem of police officers shooting dogs (as many as 30 a day, by one Department of Justice expert's estimate; in Detroit, just two officers have shot more than 100 between them).
Often, the dogs are merely playful or curious, not aggressive. But fearful officers shoot anyway, because they usually are immune from consequences.
In one case in Henrico five years ago, officers went to a house to notify a family that its son had been killed—and shot the family dog when they arrived.
Police officers have every right to protect themselves. But if ordinary citizens can face consequences for mistreating harmless pets, then those who enforce the law should, too.
They say a dog is man's best friend. It's too bad that often doesn't work the other way around.
This column originally appeared in the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
The post Virginia Can Do More to Improve Animal Welfare appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>James Hollis, an investigator for the Crawford County Sheriff's Department, arrived at the home of Joe Goodwin after Goodwin's dog allegedly bit two people. After a deputy sheriff shot the animal—"to put the dog down," as Sheriff Lewis Walker later explained to WMAZ—Hollis took it upon himself to "investigate" whether the dog had rabies. He decided to do this by ordering Goodwin to cut his dog's head off.
Goodwin asked Hollis and the deputy with him to leave his property. Hollis told him he was either going to cut his dog's head off or be taken to jail.
Goodwin acquiesced and decapitated his dog.
"That shouldn't have been done on the scene, from what I gathered," Walker told the station. The sheriff says Hollis should have merely informed the health department that it needed to come pick the dog up.
Hollis has been placed on administrative leave while the department investigates the incident, but there isn't much to investigate. Someone who believes it is appropriate to ask a person to decapitate his own dog to find out whether it has rabies is decidedly not fit to serve in law enforcement.
It doesn't, and shouldn't, matter whether he's been specifically trained or told not to tell dog owners to decapitate their pets.
The story is so incredible that Snopes fact-checked it. (Rating: true.)
You can watch a video of a portion of the incident below:
The post Georgia Cop Forced Man to Decapitate His Own Dog—To Find Out If It Had Rabies appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Toledo, Ohio, SWAT team raided Alfred Miller's home, killing his two dogs and doing thousands of dollars worth of damage. They seized just one pill, for high blood pressure. The name on the search warrant was Joe McDuffey. Miller says he doesn't know who that is. Cops will only say this is an ongoing an investigation
The post Brickbat: This Will Send Your Blood Pressure Soaring appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A sheriff's deputy in Evangeline Parish, Louisiana, killed a family's dog last month. The clop claims the dog charged at him aggressively three times before he felt the need to shoot it. The family denies this—and says the officer killed the dog in front of the children.
The deputy was responding to a harassment call next door. The dog's owner, Kelli Sullivan, told KATC that the dog was "ankle height" and weighed 12 pounds.
"My daughter was running around trying to catch her," she said to the station. "I thought we were going to go back in the house. I walked back to the house opened the door, turned around, boom, he shot her. It was a horrific event. He shot the dog up close and blew her skull apart in front of my children. Like her eyeballs were out of her head."
According to Sullivan, the deputy told her that if the dog had bit him he'd have sued them, and that shooting the dog was better than that. He then allegedly said it was a "shame" he "had to waste that bullet because it's a really expensive bullet."
The sheriff's office did not respond to KATC's request for comment.
Puppycide has been a persistent problem for police around the U.S. (even though mail carriers, who interact with America's millions of dogs on a daily basis, don't have a similar problem). Last year Reason's C.J. Ciaramella investigated how widespread unchecked police violence against dogs is in Detroit.
Unnecessary violence against animals can be a useful indicator to identify problem cops before they kill human beings. Unfortunately, state laws and contract-guaranteed job rules often make it difficult to enforce the zero tolerance policy for police misbehavior that could remove violence-prone cops from their positions.
The post Louisiana Woman Says Cop Shot Family Dog, Complained About Cost of Bullet appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Fourth Amendment requires police to obtain a warrant before searching a private home. It also requires that the home they end up searching is the one they actually have the warrant for.
Sheriff's deputies in Van Buren County, Iowa, were golden on that first requirement when they raided Michael Owings' house on June 27 for suspected drug possession. They did indeed have a warrant.
Unfortunately for them—and for Owings—their warrant allowed them to search the house of one Gary Shelley, Owings' neighbor.
In a suit filed yesterday in U.S. District Court, Owings accuses Van Buren County Sheriff Deputy John Zane and four unnamed deputies of displaying a "gross disregard" for his constitutional rights by conducting "a flagrantly illegal entry of his private residence."
The story began on June 26, when Zane carried out a traffic stop. In the course of the stop, he got a tip that illegal drug use and distribution might be going on at Shelley's residence, a two-story farm house on rural Heather Avenue. Police promptly got a warrant for Shelley's house. But they showed up at Owings' mobile home, about a third of a mile up the road.
Owings was not home at the time, but his lawsuit says there were several signs that cops had arrived at the wrong house. One was an actual sign prominently listing the address at the gate of the property. Another was a name plate reading "Owings" located next to the front door.
Undeterred, the deputies forced their way into the home, where they encountered further evidence that they were in the wrong place, including prescription bottles and bank statements bearing Owings name. To top it all off, Owings' mother and girlfriend arrived while police were still tearing through the place; they flat out told the officers that they had the wrong house.
According to the lawsuit, deputies responded by saying, "We own this property…it's ours until we are done."
The search turned up no illegal activity, and the police eventually cleared out, though not before removing items from the house and damaging the property.
Sadly, wrong-address raids are not unusual in the United States. Many of these cases lead to tragic consequences. Back in July, police in Southaven, Mississippi, killed Ismael Lopez while looking for an assault suspect at the wrong address. In 2015, Miami cops "destroyed" the home of 90-year-old woman while searching for drugs they never found. In 2012, while conducting a wrong-door raid in St. Paul, Minnesota, police killed the family dog and then forced three handcuffed children to sit by their dying pet while officers smashed up their home.
Owings is demanding compensation for the damage done to his property, for the violation of his Fourth Amendment rights, and for emotional distress. A court date has not been set.
The post 'We Own This Property…It's Ours Until We Are Done' appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A federal judge ruled Wednesday that a Michigan woman has no basis to sue the Detroit Police Department (DPD) for shooting her three dogs because they were not properly licensed.
U.S. District Court Judge George Caram Steeh dismissed a federal civil rights lawsuit filed by Detroit resident Nikita Smith last last year after a marijuana raid by Detroit police left her three dogs shot to death.
The ruling is the first time a federal court has considered the question of whether an unlicensed pet—in violation of city or state code—is protected property under the Fourth Amendment. Federal courts have established that pets are protected from unreasonable seizures (read: killing) by police, but the city of Detroit argued in a motion in March that Smith's dogs, because they were unlicensed, were "contraband" for the purposes of the Fourth Amendment, meaning she had no legitimate property interest in them and therefore no basis to sue the officers or department.
In his Wednesday opinion Steeh agreed.
"The Court is aware that this conclusion may not sit well with dog owners and animal lovers in general," the judge wrote. "The reason for any unease stems from the fact that while pet owners consider their pets to be family members, the law considers pets to be property."
"The requirements of the Michigan Dog Law and the Detroit City Code, including that all dogs be current with their rabies vaccines, exist to safeguard the public from dangerous animals," he continued. "When a person owns a dog that is unlicensed, in the eyes of the law it is no different than owning any other type of illegal property or contraband. Without any legitimate possessory interest in the dogs, there can be no violation of the Fourth Amendment."
And without any Fourth Amendment violation, Steeh continued, there is no basis for a civil rights claim against the city. Steeh also ruled that Smith's suit would have been dismissed even if she had a cognizable property interest in the dogs, finding that the animals presented an imminent threat to the officers.
Smith's lawsuit characterized the Detroit police officers who raided her house as a "dog death squad." She claimed officers shot one of her pets through a closed bathroom door. Graphic photos from the raid on Smith's house showed the dog lying dead in a blood-soaked bathroom.
Smith's case is only one of several lawsuits that have been filed against the DPD for dog shootings over the past two years. The city of Detroit settled one of those suits for $100,000 after dash cam video showed an officer shooting a man's dog while it was chained to a fence. It was also one of three lawsuits against DPD for shooting dogs during marijuana raids. The most recent was filed in June after DPD officers allegedly shot a couple's dogs while the animals were behind a backyard fence.
A Reason investigation last year found the DPD's Major Violators Unit, which conducts drug raids in the city, has a track record of leaving dead dogs in its wake. One officer had shot 39 dogs over the course of his career before the raid on Smith's house, according to public records.
That officer is now up to 73 kills, according to the most recent records obtained by Reason.
Two other officers involved in the Smith raid testified during the trial that they had shot "fewer than 20" and "at least 19" dogs over the course of their careers.
The court's opinion notes that the "police officers conducting the search had not received any specific training on how to handle animal encounters during raids."
The ruling also noted that Detroit police supervisors found that the shooting of Smith's dogs by officers were all justified. "However, as in many other cases, the ratifying officers did so without speaking to the officers about what had transpired," the court wrote.
Reason's review of "destruction of animal" reports filed by Detroit police officers did not find a single instance where a supervisor found that a dog shooting was unjustified.
Detroit police obtained a search warrant for Smith's residence after receiving a tip that marijuana was being sold out of it. Police confiscated 25 grams of marijuana as a result of the raid, and Smith was charged with a misdemeanor.
However, the case against her was later dismissed when officers failed to appear at her court hearing.
Neither an attorney for Smith nor the Detroit Police Department were immediately available for comment.
The post Federal Judge Rules Unlicensed Dogs Aren't Protected By Fourth Amendment appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>When the Lemay family's teenage daughters arrived home one Saturday, one of them had trouble with the security system's keypad and accidentally triggered the alarm. She called the security company and had the alarmed turned off in just a few minutes. But about 20 minutes after that, two Minneapolis police officers showed up. Neither came to the door, but one went around back, climbed the seven-foot fence around the home's backyard, shot the family's two dogs, then climbed back over the fence.
The post Brickbat: Come and Knock on Our Door appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A Minnesota family is facing thousands of dollars in veterinary bills after a Minneapolis police officer climbed into their backyard while responding to a burglar alarm and shot their two dogs, neither of which appeared to be charging him.
A Facebook video of the Saturday shooting posted by the dogs' owner, Jennifer LeMay, shows a Minneapolis Police Department officer walking into her backyard after climbing over a 7-foot-tall privacy fence. One of the family's Staffordshire terriers runs toward the officer, who backpedals and draws his gun. The dog stops, looking confused, and then trots toward the officer again, wagging its tail. The officers shoots the dog, which flees, and then the family's other terrier as it runs up into the frame.
According to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, LeMay's two teenage daughters arrived home on Saturday night and accidentally tripped the burglar alarm. LeMay, away from the house, called the security company and deactivated the alarm. Two Minneapolis police officers arrived shortly after, but instead of knocking on the front door, one went around to the back yard.
Watch the video of what happens next:
The Star Tribune reports:
LeMay said her 13-year-old daughter saw the entire incident from her upstairs bedroom.
"He was wagging his tail," LeMay said of Ciroc. "My dog wasn't even moving, lunging toward him or anything.
"My dogs were doing their job on my property," she said. "We have a right to be safe in our yard."
After the dogs' shooting, another officer knocked on the front door. The 18-year-old explained that she'd triggered the alarm and that it had been deactivated.
The family didn't instantly take the dogs to the emergency vet because police told the family that "animal control" would be there in minutes to assess the dogs' medical needs. No one showed up, LeMay said.
The LeMays ended up taking their dogs to an emergency vet. Both survived, although LeMay now has thousands of dollars in bills. The two dogs are emotional support animals for her two sons. The Minneapolis Police Department has apologized to the family and released a statement saying it is investigating the Facebook video and the officer's body cam footage.
These types of shootings happen regularly, athough how often is hard to say, since dog shootings are generally not tracked outside of local media reports. In the past, these shootings were mostly a PR problem for police departments. Now they're also exorbitantly expensive for municipalities (and taxpayers). Plaintiffs suing departments have began receiving not just compensatory damages but also punitive damages for emotional distress. This May, a Maryland jury awarded $1.26 million to a family whose Chesapeake Bay Retriever was shot and killed by an Anne Arundel County deputy—the largest ever verdict for a police shooting of a dog.
As I reported earlier this month, there are currently three ongoing federal civil rights lawsuits against the Detroit Police Department for shooting family dogs during marijuana raids. Last year the department settled a similar lawsuit for $100,000.
Although a small number of states have passed laws requiring police officers to receive some training on dog encounters—spurred by incidents like the shooting of LeMay's dogs—most police officers still aren't trained to read canine body language, leading to fatal encounters when they meet in close quarters. And police and dogs are interacting more than ever, due to the explosion in pet ownership over the last few decades and the rise in search warrant executions. Without better training to avoid outcomes like this one—or, in cases like Detroit's, a drastic change in how police aggressively fight the drug war—these shootings will continue.
The post Facebook Video Shows Minneapolis Police Shooting Family Dogs in Backyard appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Two Detroit residents filed a civil rights lawsuit against the Detroit Police Department Wednesday, alleging that several police officers needlessly and maliciously shot their three dogs during a marijuana raid.
Kenneth Savage and Ashley Franklin say that on July 22, 2016, Detroit police raided their house and found the dogs in a back yard bounded by an eight-foot-tall fence. The officers refused to let Savage and Franklin retrieve the dogs and, instead, shot them.
The reason? Officers found several potted marijuana plants in the backyard Savage and Franklin contend were there legally.
The suit is now the third active civil rights action against the Detroit Police Department for killing dogs during marijuana raids. A Reason investigation last year found that the Detroit Police Department's Major Violators Unit, which conducts hundreds of drug raids a year in the city, had a nasty habit of leaving dead dogs in its wake. One officer had killed 69 dogs over the course of his career, public records obtained by Reason showed.
According to a search warrant affidavit, a Detroit police officer, while investigating an unrelated matter, observed several marijuana plants outdoors at the home of Savage, Franklin, and their son.
Two days later, eight Detroit police officers arrived at the house. Police were aware Savage and Franklin had a permit to grow medical marijuana, but the plants were in violation because they were visible outside, the search warrant affidavit said.
When Franklin showed police her marijuana paperwork and demanded to see a search warrant, an officer responded, "If you keep asking for a warrant, we are gonna kill those dogs and call child protective services to pick up your kid," the lawsuit says.
Officers detained Franklin and searched the house, but could not get to the marijuana plants because of the dogs. They initially called animal control but decided to destroy the animals, the lawsuit says. Officers shot and killed one dog through the fence, broke into the backyard enclosure, and fatally shot the other two. Animal control arrived ten minutes later.
"At no time did City of Detroit police officers give Plaintiffs an opportunity to sequester the dogs to permit them to access the back yard where the subject marijuana was located," the lawsuit says. "Plaintiff Franklin offered to take the marijuana from the back yard and give it to the police but Defendant police officers refused."
Because the dogs presented no imminent threat to officers and were secured behind a fence, the lawsuit contends their killing violated Savage and Franklin's Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure. They are seeking compensatory and punitive damages, as well as attorney fees, for what they say are the Detroit Police Department's reckless actions and callous indifference to their rights.
Last year, the city of Detroit approved a $100,000 settlement to a man after police shot his dog while it was securely chained to a fence.
Michigan attorney Chris Olson, representing Savage and Franklin, is also representing Nikita Smith, who is suing Police Department for shooting her three dogs while executing a search warrant for suspected marijuana sales. A judge dismissed criminal charges against Smith when officers failed to appear at her court hearing.
The Detroit Police Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment. However, in an interview this March with a local news channel, Detroit Police Assistant Chief James White defended the department from charges that it is needlessly shooting dogs.
"This isn't Fluffy the family pet in many instances," White told the news station. "Door comes off the hinges. There's pandemonium. People are running. Perpetrator, in many instances, has a weapon himself, can start shooting. Sometimes the dog is used as a tactic to get the advantage over the officers, and I just don't think it would be acceptable to an officer to put their life at risk to try to stop a dog from attacking them during a drug raid."
No officers' lives were at risk, Franklin had already been detained, and animal control was on its way. If a jury agrees with those facts, the city of Detroit might face another costly settlement.
Unless the Detroit Police Department changes the way it prosecutes the drug war, as I've written before, these incidents are practically guaranteed to continue. In April of this year, Detroit resident Renee Attles said the police stormed into her home and killed her dog during a wrong-house drug raid:
"I am so hurt," said Renee Attles. "You all you don't understand, I am so freaking hurt. That was my dog."
Renee Attles says she ran out to her sister's car to decide where they were going to celebrate their deceased mother's birthday. All of a sudden Detroit police stormed her Ryan Street home.
"I said what do you want," she said. "They handcuffed me and her sister at her car before we even got right there. All I heard was pop, pop, pow. Just like that. I told them let me get my dog."
The post Detroit Police Sued Again For Shooting Dogs During a Marijuana Raid appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Responding to Reason investigation that found Detroit police officers shot an alarming number of dogs during violent narcotics raids, Detroit Police Department brass say that's just an unfortunate consequence of the drug war.
Detroit is currently fighting several lawsuits over drug raids that resulted in police shooting family dogs. According to public records obtained by Reason, Detroit police shot 46 dogs over a year-and-a-half between 2015 and 2016. One officer alone had shot 69 dogs during the course of his career. The city settled another lawsuit last year for $100,000 after an officer shot a man's dog while it was chained to a fence.
The Detroit Police Department never responded to multiple calls and emails for comment from Reason, but in an interview on Monday with news station Local 4, Assistant Chief James White said the shootings don't happen during regular police runs and disputed the characterization of the animals as family pets.
"This isn't Fluffy the family pet in many instances," White told the news station. "Door comes off the hinges. There's pandemonium. People are running. Perpetrator, in many instances, has a weapon himself, can start shooting. Sometimes the dog is used as a tactic to get the advantage over the officers, and I just don't think it would be acceptable to an officer to put their life at risk to try to stop a dog from attacking them during a drug raid."
There are several issues with both White's comments and how they're framed by Local 4.
First, the headline of the news article says Detroit police "refute allegations that they shoot dogs at an alarming rate." White never disputes how many dogs it shoots per year, which are well above the numbers posted by substantially larger cities like Los Angeles and New York City. The LAPD, for instance, killed eight dogs in 2015. Chicago police shot or attempted to shoot more than 80 dogs over the year-and-a-half period examined by Reason, but Chicago has a population of more than 2 million, compared to Detroit's 600,000.
Neither does White dispute that one of his officers has shot 69 dogs over the course of his career. White says this is because the officer is the pointman on drug raids, meaning first in the door. That shocking numbers makes more sense when taking into account the enormous number of narcotics raids the Detroit Police Department runs every year.
"In 2016, 1,144 known narcotics locations, but during those raids, the teams unfortunately shot 31 dogs," White said in the interview.
Three of those lethal dog shootings happened when Detroit police raided the home of Nikita Smith on a narcotics search warrant. According to Smith's lawsuit, one of the dogs was in her bathroom when police shot it from behind a closed door.
Nicole Motyka, who is also suing the Detroit Police Department, said Detroit police shot two of her beloved dogs while they were behind a wooden barrier in the kitchen. "All I have is weed," her husband Joel Castro shouted as police ordered him to the ground. "Don't kill my dogs."
Both raids were for nothing more than suspicion of selling marijuana. Criminal charges were dropped in both cases. In Motyka's case, it turned out her husband was a state-licensed medical marijuana caregiver.
Here's what one of the officers in the raid on Smith's house said in a court deposition earlier this year obtained by Reason, when asked how many narcotics raids his unit conducts:
"Probably try like three, sometimes four a day. We raid more houses in the nation than anybody walking around God's green earth. We raid more houses than anybody. We do three a day at times."
In the TV interview, White says the department will consider looking at programs in other cities that have reduced their number of dog shootings. However, without a major change in how it fights the drug war, it's hard to see how the Detroit police substantively move those numbers. In fact, this is the exact argument I made in my investigative piece:
Police are routinely asked, especially in cash-strapped cities like Detroit, to handle much more than traditional beat work, including things like mental health services and animal control. Without proper training and resources, they're often put in unwinnable situations.
But on the other side of the national debate on policing that has erupted over the last two years are communities demanding to be policed like communities rather than combat zones. If the Detroit Police Department doesn't reform policies that treat beloved pets like collateral damage in the war on the drugs, the shootings, and the lawsuits, seem practically guaranteed to continue.
I know this is a crazy idea, but maybe the best way to avoid shooting people's dogs would be to stop breaking down their doors and and running into their houses with drawn guns, all because of some marijuana.
The post Detroit Police Department Blames Drug War for Shooting So Many Dogs appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The city of Detroit argued in a recently filed court motion that a woman can't sue police for shooting three of her dogs during a drug raid because the animals were unlicensed "contraband."
Nikita Smith filed a federal civil rights lawsuit last year against the Detroit Police Department after a narcotics raid left three of her dogs shot to death. The lawsuit characterized the police as a "dog death squad" and claimed officers shot one of her dogs through a closed bathroom door. Graphic photos from the raid on Smith's house showed one dog laying dead in the blood-soaked bathroom.
Her case is only one of several lawsuits that have been filed against the Detroit Police Department (DPD) for dog shootings over the past two years. A Reason investigation last year found the DPD's Major Violators Unit, which conducts drug raids in the city, has a track record of leaving dead dogs in its wake. One officer alone had shot 69 dogs over the course of his career, according to public records.
Pets are considered property under the Fourth Amendment, protecting them from unlawful seizure (read: killing) by law enforcement. However, lawyers for the city of Detroit argue in a March 15 motion for summary judgement in Smith's suit that her dogs were unlicensed, and therefore she does not have a legitimate property interest in the animals.
According to the Detroit Metro Times, Michigan law requires dogs to be licensed to prove they have been vaccinated against rabies. The city's motion compares Smith to a minor with an alcoholic beverage, or a person with a bag of pot without a medical marijuana card, neither of whom would have a legitimate property interest protecting them from police seizures.
"Without being licensed, an unlicensed dog is property which is unlawful to possess or contraband," the city argues. "As the courts have indicated, there is no legitimate property interest protected by the 4th Amendment in contraband."
Smith's lawyer, Chris Olson, says the city's argument doesn't hold water.
"There is no case that holds that there is no legitimate property interest in unlicensed dogs, period. None," Smith says. "Which is why they didn't cite any. Second, Michigan's Dog Law of 1919 does not support their argument, either, and then there's that thing we're all familiar with called the Supremacy Clause, which makes it impossible for a city or state law to trump the Constitution. The Fourth Amendment is the supreme law of land."
The city's motion also disputes Smith's narrative of events and says the dogs were charging officers when they were shot.
Police arrested Smith for possession of marijuana, but the charges were dropped when officers failed to appear at her court date.
The post Detroit Argues Dogs Killed in Drug Raid Were 'Contraband' Because They Were Unlicensed appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The former head of the Boulder City, Nevada, animal shelter has been sentenced to 90 days in jail after pleading guilty to animal cruelty for needlessly euthanizing her own dog. An attorney for Mary Jo Frazier denied that she euthanized the dog to punish her ex-husband, who co-owned the dog with her, after their divorce. Frazier had been forced to retire from the shelter after an investigation indicated she had been needlessly euthanizing animals for years.
The post Brickbat: Dog Gone appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>The Columbus, Ohio, City Council has agreed to pay $780,000 to settle a lawsuit brought by the family of a 4-year-old girl who was shot by a police officer trying to shoot her dog. The officer had gone to the family's home because a neighbor asked for his help after the girl's mother accidentally cut herself and was frightened by the dog.
The post Brickbat: Sorry, Little Girl appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>When is it constitutional for a police officer to shoot a dog during a raid? Any time it moves or barks, according to a federal appeals court.
In a ruling released Monday, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals found Battle Creek, Mich. police officers were justified in shooting two pit bulls while executing a search warrant for drugs on the home of Mark and Cheryl Brown in 2013. The Brown's sued the police department in 2015, arguing the killing of their dogs violated their constitutional rights.
The ruling creates a similar legal standard in the Sixth Circuit—which includes Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee—that several other federal appeals courts have established, but it also appears to expand when it is acceptable for an officer to shoot a dog.
After breaking through the Brown's door, one Battle Creek officer testified that the first dog "had only moved a few inches" toward him before he shot it. The second dog ran into the basement.
"The second dog was not moving towards the officers when they discovered her in the basement, but rather she was 'just standing there,' barking and was turned sideways to the officers," the court narrative continues. "Klein then fired the first two rounds at the second dog."
Police departments around the country have been hit with expensive lawsuits for shooting family pets in recent years, following a 2005 Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that the unreasonable killing of a dog by a police officer is an unconstitutional "seizure" of property under the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution. In September, a federal jury ordered the city of Hartford, Connecticut, to pay a whopping $200,000 to a family whose St. Bernard was shot by city police in 2006. Commerce City, Colorado, settled a dog shooting case in January for $262,500.
The Sixth Circuit readily agreed with its sister court's constitutional standard, but it found the Battle Creek officers' actions were reasonable because they had no knowledge of the dogs until they arrived at the house, and because there was no witness testimony rebutting the officers' narrative of what happened inside.
"The standard we set out today is that a police officer's use of deadly force against a dog while executing a warrant to search a home for illegal drug activity is reasonable under the Fourth Amendment when, given the totality of the circumstances and viewed from the perspective of an objectively reasonable officer, the dog poses an imminent threat to the officer's safety," the court wrote.
As I reported in my November investigation of several ongoing lawsuits against the Detroit Police department for shooting family dogs, owners' accounts often differed wildly from the official police narrative of events. The officers almost always described dogs as "lunging" and "vicious" to justify their status as an imminent threat.
Yet, this is the totality of the Sixth Circuit's reasoning for the reasonableness of the shooting of the second dog:
"Officer Klein testified that the dog, a 53-pound unleashed pit bull, was standing in the middle of the basement, barking, when he fired the first two rounds," the court wrote. "The officers testified that they were unable to safely clear the basement with both dogs there. Therefore, we find that it was reasonable for Officer Klein to shoot the second dog."
The Sixth Circuit's definition of "reasonableness" here is so broad that it would it appear to classify any dog that is not standing still and silent as an imminent threat.
Detroit attorney Chris Olson, who is representing several dog owners suing the Detroit Police Department, says that while the ruling in many ways hews to the established Ninth Circuit standard, it departs significantly enough that it could be considered a circuit split—often a favorable factor in the Supreme Court's decisions on whether to review cases.
"To the extent that the case suggests that you can shoot a dog just because it's not moving and you have to clear a room, I just don't buy it," Olson says. "And I don't think the Ninth Circuit case supports that kind of activity."
Michael Oz is the director of a documentary examining police shootings of dogs, Of Dogs and Men, that was released this summer. He says the case would set an objectively unreasonable standard for dogs who end up in the line of fire.
"The greatest dog trainer in the world will not be able to keep a dog still and silent in the case of a dynamic entry like that," Oz says. "That's just not in their nature. If the standard that needs to be met to shoot is either moving or barking, then we can just assume that standard fits every dog [police] will ever encounter. It's the same as no standard."
Battle Creek Police Chief Jim Blocker told the Battle Creek Enquirer he was pleased with the ruling:
"It was a good ruling," Police Chief Jim Blocker said. "It pointed out some things we have to improve upon, but supported our operating concept that officers must act within reason."
Blocker said "officers have milliseconds to make a decision and it is a judgment call and based on too many variables. Ensuring officer safety and preventing the destruction of evidence must be protected."
The post Sixth Circuit Court: Police Can Shoot Dogs For Nothing More Than Barking appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A group of Detroit police officers executing a narcotics search warrant knocked on Nikita Smith's door on January 14, 2016. The only fact that both Smith and the officers agree on after that point is that, a short while later, Smith's three dogs were all shot dead.
What really happened in the moments between could be a costly question for the city of Detroit. In a federal civil rights lawsuit filed in May, Smith says the Detroit police executed her three pit bulls, Debo, Mama, and Smoke, without provocation. Essentially, they acted as a "dog death squad."
According the lawsuit, Smith tried to tell the officers she was putting her dogs away, and placed two in the basement and one in the bathroom. As the officers burst into the house, Debo slipped back upstairs. The officers shot it as it sat down by Smith. Next, they charged into the basement and shot Mama, who was pregnant and backed into a corner. Finally, they moved onto the bathroom, where Smoke was closed in.
One of the officers cracked the door open, peeked inside, and closed it again. "Should we do that one, too?" the officer asked, according to the lawsuit, before two of them fired through the closed door, killing Smoke.
In the police version of the story, told through reports filed after the raid, the officers received no response when they announced their presence and forced entry into the house. Inside, they encountered a "vicious grey pit bull" that charged at them. It was shot eight times. In the basement, they encountered another "vicious white pit bull" that charged toward them. It was shot five times. According to police reports, the third dog charged out of the bathroom toward the officers and was shot.
However, extremely graphic photos entered into evidence in the case show bullet holes riddling the outside of the door and the dog dead inside the bathroom.
"They produce two photos of the dead dog in the bathroom," Chris Olson, Smith's attorney, says. "It looks like The Shining. The dog is in the back of the bathroom and just covered in blood. But their story is that the dog opened the door itself and was coming to eat them. The problem is the door handle wasn't a latch. It was a knob. That's how fucked up it is. That's their story in federal court."
After shooting her dogs, the police arrested Smith for possession of marijuana and seized her car under civil forfeiture laws. The charges were later dropped, however, when the officers failed to appear at her court date.
Puppycide's Long, Sad History
Stories like Smith's happen all the time. They're so common that they've become known by the grim moniker puppycide. There's a whole category on Reason's website for such events, a 16,000-person-strong Facebook group that tracks local media reports of them, and even a database that attempts to collect information on dog shootings nationwide. But no one knows how many dogs are in fact killed by police every year.
A Justice Department official speculated in a 2012 interview with Police magazine that the number could be as high as 10,000 a year, calling it "an epidemic." That figure that is often repeated in media reports about dog shootings, but it's little more than a guess. A 2012 study by the National Canine Research Council estimated that half of all intentional police shootings involved dogs. There are no reporting requirements, unlike for other use-of-force incidents. Considering the U.S. doesn't even accurately track how many humans are killed at the hands of cops every year, it's no surprise the picture is so murky when it comes to dogs.
To shed light on the phenomenon in one U.S. city that's been hit with a series of lawsuits over dog shootings, Reason obtained the "destruction of animal" reports filed by Detroit Police Department (DPD) officers in 2015 and the first eight months of 2016. The reports provide a broader context for the individual shootings that have drawn local and national media attention. Unfortunately, they also illustrate the difficulty of getting public information from a major police department on how its officers use deadly force.
Detroit police officers killed at least 25 dogs in 2015. So far in 2016, they've shot at least 21. One officer was bitten by a dog during that time period, according to the records. There were two fatal dog attacks in Detroit in 2015 and 2016. The victims were a 4-year-old boy and a 71-year-old woman.
How do those numbers compare to other major metro areas? It's hard to say. In Chicago—a city with 2.7 million people compared to Detroit's 680,000—there were 84 incidents in which an officer fired a weapon at an animal over the same time period, according to public records obtained by Reason. In New York City, the 35,000 sworn officers of the NYPD killed nine dogs in 2014, the last year for which the department released detailed information about weapon discharges by officers. The Los Angeles and Philadelphia police departments rejected records requests for similar information, although the LAPD has admitted to killing eight dogs in 2015.
But the Detroit numbers too are incomplete. At least seven incidents registered in lawsuits and media coverage were nowhere to be found in the documents released to Reason. The Detroit Law Department, which handles public records requests for the city, said it never received those reports, which means the DPD either failed to find them—indicating a lax commitment to record keeping—or intentionally hid them, in violation of Michigan law. Either way, the actual number of dogs shot by police in Detroit is unknown and possibly much higher than the records would imply.
Detroit police officers killed at least 25 dogs in 2015. So far in 2016, they've shot at least 21.
The reports do show that in some cases, Detroit police were forced to do their best to control large, aggressive dogs running loose on the streets, sometimes in order to protect residents and other animals from being attacked. In some cases, officers spent hours trying to control loose dogs, often without any available animal control professionals to help them. Police have responded to more than 3,500 911 calls regarding dogs so far this year, according to data released by the city.
In other cases, though—especially during narcotics raids—officers have been known to leave a bloody trail of destruction behind them, with the officers' narratives often differing wildly from the stories told by the' owners. Instead of simply acting to protect themselves from "vicious, charging" animals, these folks say, Detroit police executed their dogs while the owners pleaded with them to stop. DPD officers shot some dogs while they were chained or confined, shot others merely for growling, and in some cases chased dogs from room to room and shot them multiple times before they finally died.
Vicious Dogs
Detroit Police Directives state that "an officer may shoot a dangerous animal that is posing an imminent threat of danger to the officer or others and only when the bystanders are not in jeopardy." In nearly every report where an officer killed a dog, the animal is described as "vicious" and charging toward police when it was shot. Supervisors reviewing these incidents found officers acted within department guidelines in every single one of the 40 reports reviewed by Reason.
Olson, however, says Detroit police have developed a pattern and practice of shooting dogs just for barking. According to an unredacted police report he provided, one of the officers who raided Smith's house, William Morrison, had shot 39 dogs prior to that day.
"That's a staggering number, and that's just one officer out of six involved in that case. Someone who's killed 39 dogs in the course of duty," Olson says, pausing, "is really hunting."
Morrison was previously a defendant in a 2010 civil rights lawsuit alleging excessive force and false arrest, as was Detroit Police Sergeant Roy Harris, who is also a defendant in Smith's suit. The earlier claim was settled for an undisclosed amount in 2012.
Morrison's kill count is far from the highest in the department. One Detroit police officer in the Major Violators Unit, which has handled drug raids since the city's scandal-ridden narcotics unit was disbanded in 2014, has destroyed 67 animals over the course of his time at the DPD, according to the police reports obtained by Reason. The officers' names and badge numbers were redacted in all of those reports, making it difficult to learn more about their careers.
The following account of that officer's 67th kill comes from a "destruction of animal" report filed after an April 14, 2016 narcotics raid:
Once the front door was breached, there was an Adult Size Vicious Pit Bull that would not allow the Crew entry inside the home. The canine viciously growled, showing his teeth. The action of the canine left no other alternative but to fire, putting the canine down […] Crew members continued to clear the location, to find no one inside.
Family Pets, Shot Through a Barrier
Smith's case is only one of several lawsuits filed this year against the Detroit Police Department for shooting family pets.
On January 27, a couple of weeks after the raid on Smith's house, officers from the Major Violators Unit broke down the door and stormed into Nicole Motyka and Joel Castro's house. It was another narcotics raid. The unit had tried to initiate an undercover marijuana buy from the house, according to a search warrant and affidavit, but the buyer came back empty-handed after Castro refused to sell to him. The police decided to raid the house anyway.
Inside, the situation quickly devolved into a bloodbath similar to the one at Smith's house. Motyka and her husband say their three pit bulls—YoYo, Blanca, and Junior, a one-year-old puppy—were behind a large wooden barrier in the kitchen.
According to officer testimony, the officers ordered Castro to the ground, where he yelled several times, "All I have is weed. Don't kill my dogs."
At this point, the officers' statements conflict. One DPD officer said the dogs charged when one of the officers "attempted to move the board out the way to enter the kitchen to clear the rest of the house."
But another officer testifying at the same hearing said the barrier was still in place, and the two dogs were trying to get through it. "They were trying to move the board and coming viciously," he said.
Motyka says the officer shot two of her dogs, including the puppy, over the barrier while the animals cowered in a corner of the kitchen. According to Motyka, one of the officers said, "We got some big ones here today," as animal control removed the dogs' bodies.
The Detroit Police were correct about there being drugs inside the house: 26 marijuana plants, to be exact. What they neglected to discover before busting open Motyka and Castro's door, detaining them at gunpoint, and shooting two of their dogs was that Castro was a state-licensed medical marijuana caregiver, meaning all the plants were legally owned. Castro and Motyka were arrested on drug charges, which have since been dropped. The Detroit police also tried to seize cash found at the house under asset forfeiture laws, but they ultimately failed in that endeavor as well.
"Someone who's killed 39 dogs in the course of duty," Olson says, pausing, "is really hunting."
Motyka and Castro filed a federal civil rights lawsuit in August against the city of Detroit and several of the police officers involved in the raid. The lawsuit argues Detroit enabled the violation of Motyka and Castro's constitutional rights by failing to properly train and monitor its police officers, and that the city has a de facto policy allowing such unconstitutional raids.
"I don't want anything to do with the Detroit police anymore," Motyka says. "You grow up being taught these are the people you're supposed to trust, and then they come in and kill your family. I have no love for them. None. They probably sleep well at night. We don't."
In nearly all of the recent incidents, the owners describe the Detroit police as being callous, even lighthearted, after shooting their dogs.
Two other Detroit residents represented by Olson, Hazell Hayes and Melvin Short, also filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city in June after their dog Penny was shot during a police search. "Y'all over here shooting dogs now?" a city employee asked a DPD officer in the aftermath of the raid, according to the lawsuit.
"Nah, it committed suicide," the officer allegedly replied.
Expensive Settlements
"Sergeant [REDACTED] announced crew's presence and purpose, then ordered forced entry through the front door. The officers proceeded to enter the location when they encountered a vicious pit bull that was foaming at the mouth and growling/barking aggressively. The pit bull charged at the officers. Fearing for their safety, Officer [REDACTED] fired one (1) shot from his department issued shotgun … and sergeant [REDACTED] fired one (1) shot from his department issued handgun, both striking the pit bull in the body area. The pit bull then retreated further into the residence. As the crew were clearing the residence, Officer [REDACTED] encountered the pit bull in the bathroom. The pit bull was bleeding profusely and began aggressive growling at Officer [REDACTED]. Fearing for their safety, Officer [REDACTED] fired two (2) shots striking the pit bull in the body area fatally wounding him. The crew proceeded to clear and secure the location with no further incidents […]
Also recovered and confiscated from this location was 0.4 grams crack cocaine with a street value of $160, multiple packaging baggies, and confiscated $341.00 in US Currency." —Detroit Police Destruction of Animal Report, March 4, 2016
On July 11, Durone Sanders and his pregnant fiancee had just moved into a new house on the east side of Detroit when they suddenly heard gunfire. Heavily armed police officers had shot their two-year-old pit mix through the back door. The bullet traveled through the dog and struck a living room wall inside. Police told Fox 2 Detroit they were searching for drugs, although the search warrant they used was for an unidentified man for an unspecified crime. The police ticketed Sanders and his fiancee for living in a vacant home and left.
These incident have already imposed significant legal costs on Detroit. In February, the city approved a $100,000 settlement with resident Darryl Lindsay after a police officer shot his French mastiff, Babycakes, while she was chained up outside his house. Lindsay says Babycakes was "very friendly."
"It was a people dog," he says. "I walked the riverfront every couple of days with her, and everybody wanted to pet her. She was more like a family member to me, because all my kids are grown. Like my new daughter."
Lindsay was sitting in his house eating lunch a little after 1 p.m. when he heard his dog barking. A group of DPD officers were gathered outside his house. There had been a report of gunshots fired from nearby, and the officers wanted to search Lindsay's backyard; the dog was standing in their way, secured to a fence with a metal chain.
Lindsay tried to open his window and ask for permission to bring his dog inside, but he says the officers pointed their guns at him and told him to stay where he was. A little while later, Lindsay heard the shots. Dash cam footage from a police cruiser shows an officer walking up to the dog, still chained, and shooting it twice. Another officer, exasperated, can be heard remarking on the video, "That dog ain't had shit to do with it."
The destruction of animal reports from the Lindsay, Sanders, Motyka, Smith, and Hayes cases were all missing from the documents handed over to Reason by the Detroit Police Department. Also missing were reports from a 2015 incident where an officer shot three dogs that were mauling a small child.
Detroit has settled in at least one other case: In May 2015, local country singer Alison Lewis was playing with her cattle-dog mix Millie in the open field where the old Tigers Stadium used to stand when the dog ran up to a police officer. The officer shot Lewis' dog in the face. Police described it as a jumping, barking pit bull that charged the officer, according to the Detroit Free Press. "That's absolutely not true," Lewis told local news channel WXYZ. According to Lewis' lawyer, Bill Goodman, the city of Detroit settled with her for $8,000, covering her veterinary costs and time lost from work. The dog survived.
Of course, Detroit is not the only city being hit with major lawsuits for shootings dogs. In September, a federal jury ordered the city of Hartford, Connecticut, to pay a whopping $200,000 to a family whose St. Bernard was shot by city police in 2006. Commerce City, Colorado, settled a dog shooting case in January for $262,500. In some of these cases, individual officers are being held liable for not just compensatory damages for the dog itself, but also punitive damages for emotional distress inflicted on the owners.
These hefty settlements are a relatively recent legal development, stemming from a 2005 ruling by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals that found that unjustified shootings of dogs by police are a violation of the Fourth Amendment's protections against unreasonable search and seizure. In that case, the city of San Jose was forced to pay out nearly $1 million to the families of two members of Hell's Angels whose dogs were shot by police during the execution of a search warrant.
The DPD declined to comment on any pending litigation for this story. It also refused to say what sort of training it offers or policies it has in place to govern officer encounters with dogs.
A public information officer told me I would have to put in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for those policies. While that sounds like a frustrating but typical response from a government agency, in this case it was also an obtuse one: Earlier this year I submitted a FOIA request for Detroit Police Department's manual of directives and was told they were exempt from disclosure.
A Clash Between Family Dogs and Militarized Police Tactics
There are currently around 83 million dogs in the U.S. Over the past century, they went from being outside farm animals to beloved family members. But at the same time that dog ownership started exploding in the U.S. in the '70s, so did the volatile police raids used to prosecute the drug war. The use of SWAT teams rose from around 3,000 deployments per year in 1980 to as high as 80,000 a year currently, putting more heavily armed officers than ever before in potentially violent confrontations with families and their pets.
"The two trends have collided in the family home," says Michael Oz, director of a documentary, Of Dogs and Men, released this summer that explores the topic.
Responding to costly lawsuits and media attention, several states now mandate training for officers on dealing with dogs. Colorado passed the Dog Protection Act in 2013. (Reached for comment, the Denver Police Department says it does not track dog shootings, so it couldn't determine whether the training had resulted in fewer incidents.) In Texas, the state legislature mandated dog training for police thanks to a three-year effort by Cindy Bolling, whose Border collie mix was shot by a police officer in 2012. And in Maryland, SWAT teams are required to report use-of-force incidents, including dog shootings, after a notorious 2008 drug raid on the house of the mayor of Berwyn Heights.
But many departments still don't train officers on how to read dog behavior. "In most cases, at best they get no training and no policy," Oz says. "At worst, there are departments where shooting the dog remains a matter of policy."
In smaller cities that receive less media and legal scrutiny, some police departments have shot a shocking number of dogs. Buffalo, New York, police, for instance, shot 92 dogs between 2011 and 2014, almost a quarter of them by one officer alone. The Palm Beach, Florida, Sheriff's Department shot 26 just in 2012.
The federal Justice Department has taken some steps to try to teach officers how to handle dogs. Dog trainer Brian Kilcommon produced a series of videos several years ago for the department's Community Oriented Policing Services program to train local and state officers on how to read dog behavior and respond to it appropriately. The videos are free to any police department that wants to use them, although Olson, the Detroit attorney, says none of the officers he's deposed has watched them.
Police officers and dogs, Kilcommon says, suffer from a deadly misunderstanding. The body language that police are trained to use on duty—imposing and authoritative—is the same body language that dogs read as a threat. And the behavior that dogs respond to a threat with—barking and growling—is the same behavior that leads police to shoot them.
"Dogs are there to warn the owner," Kilcommon says. "That same warning sequence is what gets them killed, because police don't know what they're looking at. I fully support police officers protecting themselves from being hurt. What is troubling is in many of these situations, there is not a threat. Their lack of education and understanding creates the situation. You look at some of the videos, and as far as I'm concerned, they're absolutely at fault."
Many police departments still don't train officers on how to read dog behavior.
For instance, the New York City Civilian Complaint Review Board found earlier in October that an NYPD officer abused his authority when he shot a woman's dog a split-second after it slipped out the door of an apartment and began walking toward him, wagging its tail.
Cynthia Bathurst, executive director of the animal welfare group Safe Humane and also a co-producer of the Justice Department videos, says that while videos help, "there's nothing better than face-to-face." Bathurst says one Chicago SWAT team she's worked with has executed roughly 1,000 search warrants over a 10-year-period and only shot one dog.
"Please don't shoot my dogs!"
"Charged by white pit bull. Officer [REDACTED], fearing being bitten by the dog, fired one round from his department approved shotgun at the dog. The first round missed the dog and struck the floor and bottom of the wall. Officer [REDACTED] then fired a second round, striking the dog in the left shoulder. The dog then fled under a drawer in a hallway closet. Officer had to get onto the ground to get a clear shot. Officer [REDACTED] fired one shot from his department issued handgun, striking the dog in the left shoulder. The dog then fled to the bathroom and hid behind the toilet. The dog being in extreme distress, Officer [REDACTED] fired one more shot striking the dog in the head killing it." —Detroit Police Department Destruction of Animal Report, October 21, 2015
In Detroit, the number of drug raids has fallen steeply in recent years, from 3,462 in 2012 to 855 in 2015. The city says it's focusing in on big-time drug crimes, hence the name of the Major Violators Unit. But that still amounts to more than two raids a day—two violent, armed encounters per day between police, residents, and often their pets.
If the police narratives of these encounters are taken at face value, one might get the sense that every one of the dogs that DPD encounters on its drug raids is a violent animal trained to protect its violent drug-dealer owners.
For example, one of the destruction of animal reports obtained by Reason describes a December 1, 2015, narcotics raid on a house in west Detroit that resulted in the confiscation of a large bag of marijuana, a shotgun, and four empty pill bottles. Officers also shot three vicious, charging pit bulls, according to the report, killing one and wounding the other two.
What the police report doesn't mention is who else was in the house when officers started breaking down the door: Danuta Malysz, an elderly woman who has lived in the neighborhood since 1968.
"He was aiming the gun at the dogs, and I started screaming, 'Please don't shoot my dogs, please don't shoot my dogs!'" Malysz recalled in an interview with the World Animal Awareness Society a day after the incident. "He said, 'How many dogs do you have?' I said four, and one is the neighbor's. And then he started shooting."
Malysz was removed from the house by police after the first dog was shot. When the officers left and she was allowed back inside, she found her three dogs shot and bleeding out. She couldn't walk in the kitchen because the "floor was bloody, completely covered in blood." One of her dogs had been hit in the hindquarters, which is an unusual angle for a bullet to strike a charging, vicious pit bull.
Malysz said one of the officers told her as they were leaving, "Don't blame us, blame your grandson."
Over and over again, residents say the Detroit police officers who shot their dogs shrugged it off, as if it were a common and unavoidable occurrence. The experience has left owners like Darryl Lindsay, who received a $100,000 settlement, not only traumatized but bitter.
"They need some damn sensitivity training or something, I don't know what," Lindsay says of the DPD. "They come into your house and kill your family member and don't say nothing. Money is nothing. You couldn't give me enough for my dog. That's my damn dog. And then every time you hear a dog bark, you wonder if it's going to happen again."
Police are routinely asked, especially in cash-strapped cities like Detroit, to handle much more than traditional beat work, including things like mental health services and animal control. Without proper training and resources, they're often put in unwinnable situations.
But on the other side of the national debate on policing that has erupted over the last two years are communities demanding to be policed like communities rather than combat zones. If the Detroit Police Department doesn't reform policies that treat beloved pets like collateral damage in the war on the drugs, the shootings, and the lawsuits, seem practically guaranteed to continue.
"They don't need to be dog trainers," Safe Humane's Bathurst says of police. "They just need to know what to look for and defuse or control the situation with the resources available. It's the compassionate and right thing to do. It's better for community relations. And if that doesn't move them, the huge lawsuits should."
The post Why Are Detroit Cops Killing So Many Dogs? appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>It's been all of two months since we've reported anything about Detroit Police shooting dogs under suspicious circumstances while perpetuating the drug war. Time for a couple more cases!
Crumbling, constantly ailing Detroit has a reputation for being a hotbed of crime and violence, but numbers from the FBI show that violence in Detroit has been dropping recently, even as other major cities have seen an uptick. It has seen a slight increase in homicides in 2016, but again, much smaller than what other major cities have been seeing.
Unfortunately whatever methods are contributing to the drop in crime don't seem to include more thoughtful community policing. WJBK, Detroit's FOX affiliate, has two new stories that have popped up since that last case Jacob Sullum reported. In each case the police shot and killed dogs in raids that don't even seem to be leading to any sort of criminal charges.
The most recent story has police raiding a family, claiming it was a "drug house." The couple had three dogs gated off in the kitchen and were of no threat. The police fired six shots at the dogs, killing two. According to the family's attorney, all six police officers in the raid copied each other's account of in their police reports, each saying that the dogs were aggressive and attacked them. But when actually asked about it, two officers gave conflicting accounts:
One said the dogs were shot because they were jumping over the barricade. The other officer said the dogs got through the barricade and were shot while attacking another officer in the living room.
Pictures taken at the crime scene tell another story entirely: pools of blood were in the corner of the kitchen, 11 feet from the barricade.
"So we've got those two contradicting statements from these two officers. Now I would have loved to have asked the other officers what happened, and maybe perhaps gotten another story or two or three, or four, but the judge didn't allow me to. Which far too many times happens in criminal cases," [attorney Solomon] Rander said.
Also of note: All the police found in the house was some marijuana, which the couple owned legally under Michigan's medical marijuana laws. The husband was initially charged for possession, but then the charges were dropped.
In another case reported in July, police again claimed to have been raiding a "drug house." In this case, according to the man who had just moved in there with his fiancée, police apparently shot the dog through a front window before even entering the house for the raid. And while the police say they found drugs, nobody at the home was charged with any drug-related crimes. They were cited with "living in a vacant home," which they're challenging in court.
The post Detroit Police Continue War on Dogs appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Police in Wynnewood, Oklahoma arrived at the home of the Malones with a warrant for someone who had lived at the rental residence 10 years earlier, according to local TV station Fox 25.
While there, an unidentified police officer took what Fox 25 described as a high-powered rifle from his vehicle and shot Opie, described as a bulldog/pitbull mix, multiple times, including at least twice in front of children who were having a birthday party, according to Vicki Malone, the mother. Police insist the dog came around the house to menace police, but Fox 25 reports it obtained video that showed the dog lying on the ground with a bullet wound in its head near the fence, not near the house as police insisted.
The police chief also admitted to Fox 25 that they knew the Malones were the most recent residents and that a number of people had moved in and out of the house. But, said Ken Moore, police "had to start somewhere," and the warrant gave them the authority to enter the Malone property without their permission.
For her part, Vicki Malone says she never saw any warrant. Eli, the five-year-old whose birthday party police crashed to shoot and kill his dog, told Fox 25 he was sad the police did not apologize for killing his dog.
The post Cop Uses 'High-Powered Rifle' to Shoot Child's Dog Through Fence appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A federal lawsuit filed last week says Detroit police officers serving a drug warrant gratuitously shot three dogs that were not threatening them in any way, including one that was confined in a bathroom, which they shot through the door. The lawsuit, first reported by the New York Daily News, says the cops "acted as [a] dog death squad and stormed through the house, executing Plaintiffs' dogs as they went."
In their complaint, Nikita Smith and Kevin Thomas, who share a house on Sussex Street, say "a large number" of cops arrived there about 12:30 p.m. on January 14, demanding entry. Smith, who was home alone at the time, called out, "Let me put my dogs down in the basement." She put her two pit bulls, a male named Debo and a pregnant female named Mama, in the basement and blocked the door leading from it. She put the third dog, a female Rottweiler named Smoke, in a bathroom and closed the door.
After police "entered the residence without permission," Debo managed to get past the barrier across the doorway to the basement and sat down next to Smith. As she reached out to him, police opened fire and shot him several times, even though Smith was nearby. "You could have been killed," one officer later said, according to the lawsuit. After killing Debo, the cops then went down into the basement and shot Mama, who "was not barking or attacking the police at any time."
Next an officer opened the bathroom door, saw Smoke, and closed the door. "Should we do that one, too?" a cop asked. "Yes," another answered. Two cops "then fired multiple shots through the closed bathroom door, which killed Smoke." One of them reportedly exclaimed, "Did you see that? I got that one good!" The evidence introduced by Smith and Thomas includes pictures of the bloody aftermath and bullet holes in the bathroom door.
According to The Detroit News, a police report obtained by Chris Olson, the lawyer representing Smith and Thomas, claims the dogs were aggressive. The report says one officer "encountered a vicious gray pit bull at the front door, at which time he fired his department issued shotgun, striking the dog." But the lawsuit says "none of Plaintiffs' dogs attacked or threatened [any] Defendant in any way," and it is hard to see how a dog shut in a bathroom could have posed an imminent threat. Photography Is Not a Crime reports that "police claimed they had no audio or video of the incident."
The version of events described in the lawsuit is sadly plausible, given the past behavior of cops confronting dogs in Detroit and elsewhere. A month after police killed Debo, Mama, and Smoke, the Detroit City Council approved a $100,000 settlement with the owner of a chained Dogue de Bordeaux shot by police looking for a suspect who was not there. In that case the officer who killed the dog also claimed it posed a threat, saying "a brown dog charged towards me, attempting to bite me." But according to the owner's lawsuit, dashcam video of the incident shows the officer "walk towards Babycakes in her driveway to a position just beyond the reach of Babycakes' steel cable leash, pause, aim and shoot her twice with his department issued M&P 40 caliber handgun."
After the settlement, Olson, who also represented the dog owner in that case, expressed the hope that "police officers in Detroit will hear this story and be much more mindful of the magnitude of the rights that are involved here." The unnecessary killing of a dog can qualify as an unconsitutional seizure of property under the Fourth Amendment. Olson cites a 2005 decision in which the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit held that "defendant police's shooting of plaintiff's dogs was an unreasonable seizure in particular where defendant police officers had notice of the dog's presence and were not surprised by them and had no plan to deal with the dog other than by shooting it."
Smith says one of the officers who raided her home told her, "I should have killed you, too." Olson told The Daily News "she's terrified," since "those same cops drive through her neighborhood every day." Smith was initially charged with marijuana possession, but the case was dismissed after the cops failed to appear in court.
"They had a warrant to search the house," Olson said. "That we don't really quarrel with. But when you search the house, you can't go in the house and kill all the dogs."
Since the justification for the search was something (drug possession) that shouldn't be treated as a crime, and the resulting charge was so trivial that the cops could not be bothered to show up in court, we really should quarrel with the idea that police had a right to be in the house. Every confrontation prompted by the morally atrocious war on drugs is an invitation to violence, and all too frequently it's human blood that ends up on the floor.
The post Lawsuit Says Detroit Cops Shot Confined Dog Through Bathroom Door appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>At about 5:30am on February 13, 2016,
Yvonne Rosado was dancing with her 70-pound pitbull Spike when the dog became spooked by noises in the hallway. Rosado reportedly opened the front door of her apartment a crack to see what was going out outside, when Spike slid past her and toward NYPD Officer Ruben Cuesta standing in the hallway.
As seen on a closed circuit video recording, Spike takes a few steps toward Cuesta, but three seconds after the dog crossed his front door, he had a bullet in his head.
Cuesta and his partner were speaking to Rosado's neighbor about an individual who had reportedly been in the building in violation of an order or protection. Though that person was long gone, Cuesta was so spooked by the sight of a dog exiting a neighboring apartment, that he immediately drew his gun, retreated two steps down the stairwell and shot the dog.
Rosado claims she was screaming "He's friendly!" during the fateful seconds between the door opening and her dog's grisly death. Still in her underwear, Rosado followed Cuesta down the stairs and slapped him several times before she was restrained. No charges were filed against her.
Rosado told the New York Daily News that an NYPD officer had also killed her cat six years ago. She alleges officers broke the feline's neck during a search of her mother's apartment.
The NYPD, which has a policy that officers are only permitted to shoot animals "to defend themselves or others from threat of physical injury, or death" and that such force must only be used as a last result, says they are investigating the incident. The Daily News reports that the NYPD shot 18 animals in 2014 and as many as 36 in 2011.
Click here to watch video of the incident (Warning: graphic and disturbing).
The post NYPD Officer Shoots Dog Three Seconds After He Slipped Through a Cracked Door appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Last week a West Virginia woman who stood between her dog and a state trooper intent on killing him was acquitted of obstructing an officer by a jury in Wood County. It took jurors just half an hour to acquit 23-year-old Tiffanie Hupp after they watched the video of the incident that Hupp's husband, Ryan, shot with his cellphone.
Trooper Seth Cook came to the Hupps' house on May 9, 2015, in response to a dispute between a neighbor and Ryan's stepfather. There Cook encountered Buddy, a Labrador-husky mix who was chained outside the house. The dog, whom Hupp describes as "a big baby," ran toward Cook, barking, and Cook backed up. Even though the dog had reached the end of his chain and Cook was not in any danger, he drew his pistol. "I immediately thought, 'I don't want him to get shot,'" Hupp, who was in the yard with her 3-year-old son, told the Charleston Gazette-Mail. The video shows her stepping in front of Cook, at which point he grabs her, throws her to the ground, picks her up, leans her against his cruiser, and handcuffs her.
"The officer alleged in the complaint that she raised her arm," Hupp's lawyer, David Schles, told the Gazette-Mail, "but we did stop-frame [of the video] for the jury, and it showed she was stationary, her arms at her side….All she said was 'Don't do that,' and [Cook] grabbed her by the bicep and spun her around, and she ends up falling down."
After he heard about the case, Schles contacted Hupp and offered to represent her for free. "I thought it was outrageous, this girl is being charged for standing in her yard doing nothing but saying, 'Don't shoot my dog,'" he said. According to Photography Is Not a Crime (PINAC), Cook "testified that he was not afraid of the dog, but was following training that required him to kill all dogs that approach him, even if it was chained and wagging its tail as Buddy was doing in this case."
Hupp told PINAC her case hinged on her husband's video, which they did not have for weeks after the incident because Cook confiscated the phone, which he was unable to access because it was protected by a password. "Without that video, it's just my word against a state trooper," she said. "Nobody is going to believe my word over law enforcement."
The post Jury Acquits Woman Arrested for Protecting Her Dog From a Cop appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>DeKalb County, Georgia, police responding to a report of a possible burglar outside a house went to the wrong home, entered through an unlocked rear door, immediately shot and killed the homeowner's dog, shot the homeowner when he ran into the room and also shot one of their colleagues in the hip. Police Chief James Conroy said he can't discuss the specifics of the case, but he did say, "We want officers to go out and investigate crimes like this rather than react."
The post Not a Creature Was Stirring … appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>When Cleveland, Mississippi, resident Tyler Muzzi spotted a strange man walking around his neighbor's house, he called the cops. They arrived just in time to arrest the man after he entered the house. Then one of the officers shot Muzzi's dog, which was on a leash in his backyard. Muzzi says the cop apologized and said he felt threatened by the dog and didn't see the leash. But he adds that the police chief later admitted the officer did see that it was leashed but said he still had a right to shoot the dog because he felt threatened.
The post Brickbat: Wrong Move appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>A lawsuit filed against police in the St. Louis County in Missouri sounds like a hat trick of abusive law enforcement behavior. The allegations include the overzealous application of code enforcement, misuse of SWAT teams, and as the topper, the execution of a dog by police.
In short, Angela Zorich and her family in south St. Louis County allege that police used a SWAT team to execute a warrant whose purpose was apparently just to check to see whether their home had gas and electricity and immediately shot Kiya, their 4-year-old pit bull, after bursting into their home. The Riverfront Times in St. Louis documents the timeline of incidents that has the stench of both retaliation and using administrative warrants as a cover for some other form of search:
On April 25, 2014, St. Louis County Police officers came to her house. Her son cussed at them. They inspected the home's exterior and placed a "Problem Properties" sticker on the front window.
On April 28, Zorich called the police to follow up on the matter. An officer told her they were investigating the home for failing to have natural gas or electric service, as required by county ordinance. She admitted that the gas had been shut off, but said the claim about electricity was "bullshit." The officer hung up on her.
Zorich called back and spoke to a different officer. This one sounded angry that he'd been cussed at by her son three days earlier. Zorich tried to set up an inspection for a time when her husband would be home. The officer told her that was fine, but that the investigation would continue in the meantime.
The next day, around 12:41 p.m., Zorich was at home with several family members and her pit bull, Kiya, when a St. Louis County Police Tactical Response Unit burst through the door without knocking, according to her suit. The unit had at least five officers with M-4 rifles, supported by at least eight uniformed officers.
The officers entered so quickly, Zorich's suit alleges, that Kiya didn't even have time to bark. A tactical officer fired three shots into the dog, and the dog's "bladder and bowels released and she fell to the floor." The dog "was laying on the floor in her own waste and blood struggling to breathe. She had a gaping hole in her chest."
Zorich was then taken into custody and given a bunch of citations from the county's housing inspector over the condition of her home. She says that when she got home she found her beds overturned, closets searched, and stuff from shelves thrown on the floor. Then the county condemned the home.
The Riverfront Times asked for a copy of the incident report for the case and information on how frequently officers were attacked by dogs while executing warrants. They were told that it would take up to two weeks to get them the information.
If Zorich's claims are true, the whole situation sounds similar to what police in Orange County, Florida, were doing to barber shops down there. They brought in SWAT raids to perform extremely intrusive "administrative inspections." What they were clearly doing was trying to search for drugs without a warrant. They were rebuked by the feds in 2014. This is an issue going back for years though, and Radley Balko wrote about it back in 2010. Now at the Washington Post, Balko took note of this case as well as the trend of St. Louis County towns to try to extract money from residents via hardcore code enforcement citations.
In this case, the police did have a warrant, but clearly not to search for drugs. There was obviously no need to bring in a SWAT team and burst into the home here, even if the family had a history of being problem tenants and were rude to police. It's not like they were going to try to flush their fuse box down the toilet to destroy the evidence.
The post Code Enforcement Mania, Misused SWAT Teams, and Police Puppycide Converge in Unholy Trinity for St. Louis Family appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Police dogs (K-9s) are treated like police officers, and intentionally harming such dogs (or other police animals, like horses) is in fact a federal offense, punishable by up to 10 years in prison. Shooting a police dog, even a retired one, earned one Florida teenager a 23 year sentence in prison last year.
This week, a cop in Hialeah, Florida, allegedly left two K-9s living in his house in Davies in their crates in his SUV for at least six hours in the middle of the day, where they died of overheating. He won't be charged with killing a cop, as the Broward Palm Beach New Times explains, because while the two K-9s will receive a police funeral, they're not technically considered police officers in Florida. Long sentences for killing police dogs, like the one the Florida teen got last year, are produced by multiple charges, and the New Times speculates it's unlikely prosecutors will charge him with anything other than the state's third-degree felony law against harming or killing police dogs, which can come with up to a 5 year sentence.
Via the New Times:
Considering that two other recent cases of officers killing their K-9s resulted in no prison time, the maximum penalty is unlikely. As the Herald pointed out yesterday:
In 2007, Miami-Dade police Sgt. Allen Cockfield was charged with animal cruelty after prosecutors determined a kick he administered to his German shepherd Duke during a training session was a fatal blow. Cockfield was later acquitted at trail.
Then in March 2008, Miami officer Rondal Brown was arrested and charged with animal cruelty after his bloodhound Dynasty starved to death… Dynasty was discovered starving and emaciated. Brown later left the police department and agreed to serve probation on animal cruelty charges.
Things tend to work out differently for civilians charged with harming canine officers.
So far, Nelson Enriquez, the Hialeah cop who allegedly killed his K-9s, has been suspended with pay. The Davies police department is investigating the deaths of the dogs, while the Hialeah police say they're conducting an internal investigation. One of the K-9s killed was the department's only bloodhound, trained to search for missing children.
The post Florida Cop Allegedly Left K-9s in Overheated SUV to Die appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>