California must limit law enforcement use of canines, ACLU report says

Los Angeles Police Department K-9 Dutch shows off.

By Defne KarabaturAudience Engagement Editor

Jan. 10, 2024 3 AM PT

When 64-year-old Richard Earl May Jr. entered a construction site in Half Moon Bay to rescue his neighbor’s lost cat in January 2015, he triggered an alarm that summoned San Mateo County sheriff’s deputies to the site with a K-9 unit.

May was unarmed and cooperated with officers, according to the ACLU of Southern California, but the encounter still ended with a police dog biting him numerous times, causing serious puncture wounds in his right calf that required hospitalization and left him injured for weeks.

May, who sued San Mateo County after the incident and was ultimately awarded $1.1 million by a civil jury, was among dozens of cases cited in a policy brief released Wednesday by the ACLU, which said state law enforcement agencies use K-9s to inflict “unnecessary, disproportionate harm on people” who commit minor crimes.

The civil liberties group said bystanders and “people experiencing a behavioral health crisis” have been attacked, and that police have used dogs to “perpetrate racialized violence.”

“There are no statewide regulations on how canines can be used across our state,” said Eric Henderson, a legislative advocate at ACLU California Action. “That means that it’s up to every department to craft their own policy.”

Police officials and training experts say dogs used on patrol help protect officers and apprehend suspects, while others trained for detection can help find drugs and bombs.

Javier Acosta, a spokesperson for the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office, said that despite the outcome of May’s case, police dogs remain “great tools for us for apprehension, narcotics detection, explosives detection and location of missing persons.”

Brad Meyer, the founder of Meyer’s Police K9 Training in Chico, said the dogs are trained to bite and hold a suspect until the handler arrives on the scene or the dog is verbally told to release.

“You have to do ongoing training with them on a regular basis,” said Meyer, who noted that dogs in his program can receive monthly maintenance training for recall, search, apprehension, bite, release, control and obedience work.

But according to Henderson, who worked on state legislation introduced last year that aims to regulate K-9 units, the dogs used for apprehension purposes are “trained to bite the first person that they find when they’re released.”

“I think people think that there are some sort of restrictions about what [policies] are in place, and that’s not true,” Henderson said. “There are only recommendations.”

Elizabeth Norton, a retired Butte County prosecutor who works with Meyer, said dog handlers must “assess a situation second by second if a deployment is appropriate and [for] how long.”

“You have to call the dog off after the suspect sees the dog inbound and surrenders, even if the dog is just about to bite,” Norton said. She opposed the new state regulations proposed last year and said handlers should rely on “standards [that] are already in place and appropriate constitutionally,”

Norton acknowledged that some incidents involving K-9s are “absolutely terrible,” but said that in situations where an armed suspect is dangerous and doesn’t comply with the officers, “taking the dog out of the equation limits the options an officer has.”

Out of 37 California police agencies analyzed by the ACLU, only the San Jose Police Department explicitly limited the use of canines to situations “involving a threat of serious injury to officer or someone else,” the report said.

Stephanie Padilla, a staff attorney at the ACLU of Southern California and a co-author of the report, said that most of the policies they reviewed were extremely broad and vague.

“There is a discrepancy between how dogs are trained. Some policies include some training guidelines while others don’t include any information on how to train” K-9s, Padilla said.

According to the ACLU report, “nearly half of Californians severely injured or killed by police attack dogs showed signs of a mental health disability or crisis.” In Bakersfield, for example, “more than half of all people severely injured by an attack dog in 2020 were displaying symptoms of mental illness or impairment.”

“Oftentimes,” Padilla said, “what we see is individuals experiencing a mental health crisis have a harder time understanding what’s happening and require more time to comply with officers’ requests. And officers will still unleash these dogs.”

Sgt. Andrew Tipton, spokesperson for the Bakersfield police, said the department hadn’t seen the ACLU report and disputed its findings, saying that in 2020 it had eight uses of force involving a police canine, four of which involved suspects “displaying signs of alcohol or drug impairment,” and another involving “erratic behavior — no apparent reason.”

“None of the incidents involved persons displaying signs of mental disability,” Tipton said.

Dr. Altaf Saadi, a neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and assistant professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School, helped draft a report by Physicians for Human Rights in conjunction with the ACLU to study the severity of police dog bite injuries.

Saadi told The Times that severe bites can have “lifelong ramifications.”

The dogs often “fail to release when an officer asks them to, so the officers have to physically remove them,” Saadi said, which can lead to laceration wounds, deeper penetrations, scars, permanent disfigurement, chronic pain, post-traumatic stress disorder and exorbitant medical expenses.

“These injuries then spill into other aspects of people’s lives, from [affecting their ability to] maintain employment to having to be on permanent disability,” she said.

Both the ACLU and the Physicians for Human Rights reports found a lack of transparency and accountability regarding K-9 units across California. According to the ACLU, no agency “reported that it disciplined any officer for any use of force involving canines.”

The ACLU also found that “two-thirds of Californians severely injured by police dogs are people of color,” stating that “Black Californians are 2.6 times more likely to be seriously injured by police attack dogs than white people.” The report called for new legislation that would “impose strict limits on — if not the complete elimination of — the use of police attack dogs against the public.”

Maulings by California police dogs linked to lack of regulation, ACLU report finds

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