Jul 30, 2023
1960's civil rights protestor attacked by k9
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1960's civil rights protestor attacked by k9
Police dog bites blind man in church hostel, prompting lawsuit
Police in Circleville, Ohio, on Wednesday fired an officer who unleashed his dog on a Black man during a highway traffic stop and ordered th
July 26 (Reuters) - Police in Circleville, Ohio, on Wednesday fired an officer who unleashed his dog on a Black man during a highway traffic stop and ordered the animal to attack even though the man had his hands raised, according to video of the incident.
"Officer (Ryan) Speakman did not meet the standards and expectations we hold for our police officers. Officer Speakman has been terminated from the department, effective immediately," police in a statement.
Speakman could not be reached for comment, but the Ohio Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, a police union, said in a statement that Speakman was fired "without JUST CAUSE" and it was filing a grievance on his behalf.
The incident unfolded on July 4 after law enforcement officers engaged in the lengthy pursuit of a semi-tractor trailer driven by Jadarrius Rose, 23. The vehicle was missing a mud flap and it had failed to stop for an inspection, a report from the Ohio State Highway Patrol (OSHP) said.
It came to a halt on a state highway about 40 miles (64 km) south of Columbus after officers deployed tire deflation devices, known as "stop sticks," for a second time.
In a video provided by the highway patrol, Rose is standing by the vehicle with his hands raised as law enforcement officials order him to get on the ground.
Moments later, an officer with the Circleville Police Department unleashed a police dog on Rose even though a state trooper told the local officer not to release the dog.
"Do not release the dog - with his hands up," the trooper can be heard shouting on the video.
The video shows the dog running towards Rose, now on his knees, and appears to show the canine biting and pulling the driver. Rose screams loudly and can be heard saying, "please get it off."
A social media campaign that formed after the story came to light last week has called a protest for Saturday. A Facebook group called Dismantle Circleville Police demanded the dismissal of Speakman and Police Chief Shawn Baer, in addition to dropping all charges against Rose.
Circleville police department declined to comment beyond the statement.
Why K-9s in Indianapolis have mauled so many people—and why that may change.
Some people describe a police dog’s bite as a deep tear through their flesh. Others are haunted by the feeling of a Vise-Grip, the dog's jaws slowly but painfully tightening around their arms or legs until the muscles go numb.
These are not the nips or snaps of a pet dog in a backyard. A police dog, trained for weeks on how to bite harder and faster and with little reservation, can inflict debilitating injuries and lasting scars. The physical damage lingers as long as the memories of a dog’s snarling teeth, its guttural growls, its head ripping back and forth upon crashing into a fleeing target, all while a police officer stands nearby shouting commands and praise in German, Dutch or Czech.
Across the nation, police dogs bite thousands of people a year. And in no major city is someone more likely to be bitten than in Indianapolis.
The Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department, home to one of the largest K-9 units in the country, has the highest rate of dog bites among police departments in the largest 20 U.S. cities.
Some cities saw one police dog bite over the last three years. In Indianapolis, it was once every five days.
Law enforcement officers from around the United States train with their police dogs on how to capture a suspect at Vohne Liche Kennels, in Indiana, on Sept. 23, 2020. Dogs are muzzled for the protection of the man acting as a decoy, who is not wearing typical bite gear for this training exercise.Mykal McEldowney/IndyStar
Those are just some of the findings of a yearlong investigation by IndyStar and the Invisible Institute in Chicago, along with The Marshall Project, and AL.com.
The first-of-its-kind national analysis included a review of police dog bites from 2017-19. That review found that IMPD dogs bit 243 people over those three years. That’s more bites than New York; Chicago; Philadelphia; San Antonio; Dallas; Austin; San Francisco; Fort Worth; Columbus; Seattle; and Washington, D.C.
Combined.
Police K-9 Bites per 100,000 Residents
Among police departments in the 20 largest cities, some have much higher rates of police dog bites than others. Between 2017 and 2019, Indianapolis Metropolitan Police dogs had 243 bites, or about 28 bites per 100,000 residents. But city police in Chicago, Philadelphia and San Francisco each recorded only one incident.
Source: Analysis of use of force data from police departments, population data from the Census Bureau.
Per-capita rates use the latest five-year census population estimates and are approximations. City police departments in Los Angeles, Houston and San Antonio may include serious non-bite injuries in their K-9 use of force records. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department data for bites in 2019 include numbers through January 23, 2020.
The investigation also revealed for the first time:
Nearly 60 percent of people who had been bitten in Indianapolis were suspected in only low-level and non-violent crimes or traffic infractions; bites that would appear to be out of policy in some other cities, such as Seattle and Washington, D.C.
At least 65 percent of those bitten were unarmed and did not act violently, facts that contradict IMPD’s stated reasons for using dogs so often.
More than half of the people who were bitten are Black, a disproportionately high number for a population that makes up just 28 percent of the city.
15 percent of people bitten were younger than 18. Three-fourths of the juveniles are Black.
Sometimes police dogs bite the wrong people entirely, such as police officers at a crime scene or innocent bystanders in a neighborhood.
Marshawn Wolley, a community leader who has worked alongside Indianapolis city and police leadership to reform IMPD’s policies, said he was shocked to learn about what’s happening with IMPD’s dogs.
"This is not meeting the standards of what we expect from a professional police department. They have missed the mark. Dramatically,” Wolley said. “There’s really no hiding from this. They set the standard for being the worst. This has to be addressed. This has to be addressed."
Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett declined an interview request. He answered questions by email.
"These numbers are clear evidence that we must continue to have a dialogue with our community around what they expect not just of the K-9 unit," Hogsett said via email, “but of their police department as a whole."
The high number of bites in Indianapolis is driven in part by the convergence of two factors: a comparably loose set of IMPD policies that enables K-9 officers to release their dogs on people suspected of committing low-level offenses and, critics say, an old-school policing culture that encourages officers to do just that.
When IndyStar presented its findings to IMPD Chief Randal Taylor this month, he said he was concerned about the numbers.
"You know, I would hope we wouldn't have to bite that often," Taylor said. "If there's changes we need to make, I'm always for that."
Then, in an email Oct. 7, Taylor announced his department had drafted a new policy that, he says, will eventually place restrictions on the use of police dogs. For example: Officers would no longer deploy dogs on suspects in misdemeanor cases unless they believed that person is armed, though dogs would still be justified in all felony cases.
The policy change, if enacted, would have stripped out as many as 23 bites in misdemeanor cases over the last three years—an amount larger than the total number of bites found in some major cities.
That said, it's just 10 percent of the bites in Indianapolis. Even if they were removed from IMPD's total, Indianapolis would still remain the major city where someone is most likely to be bitten by a police dog.
Our top tips for journalists from the partnership that produced “Mauled.”
When we began publishing the “Mauled” project about the dark side of police K-9 units, we also began hearing from reporters around the country. They were wondering if the problems we described—officers using dogs as weapons to catch, bite and injure people—were happening in their communities, and how they could prove it.
Our answer to the first question was, “Probably,” especially if there has been at least one questionable bite in the community. Our reporters found more than 150 cases over the last five years in which police dogs inflicted serious injuries not only on suspects, but also on bystanders, children, police officers and dog handlers. The incidents occurred across the nation, from Alaska to Alabama, Connecticut to California.
But the use of dogs varied widely among the police departments for which we got data through public records requests; cities like Chicago and San Francisco reported only one bite each, while in Indianapolis police dogs bit someone every five days.
As for how to prove it, that takes a commitment to collecting and crunching data, gathering cases and interviewing a lot of people. One place to start looking is the database we compiled of serious incidents, which is searchable by state.
Here are our other tips for landing a great story:
Court records can be key. People who have suffered severe dog-bite injuries sometimes file lawsuits in federal or state courts contending that police violated their civil rights. Our project began with AL.com in Alabama, where Challen Stephens had heard about a single police dog in Talladega that sent nine people to the hospital with gruesome wounds in just one year. After reading thousands of pages of court records, Stephens learned that the dog chased down and mauled people whose “crime” was usually running from the police, in a city where Black residents in particular feared interacting with officers.
“I had no idea they used dogs this way,” Stephens says. “I was like everybody else, I thought police dogs were friendly and sniffed out the bad guys.”
He turned to The Marshall Project for help in figuring out whether Talladega was unusual, or whether many departments deployed police dogs to bite and hold people. Abbie VanSickle, our investigative reporter in California, started to look through news reports and court records across the country and found dozens of incidents in the last five years involving law-enforcement agencies. She discovered that some lawyers specialize in dog-bite cases, and by running their names through PACER, the electronic records system for federal courts, was able to find cases that had not drawn media attention. She also combed through lawsuit notices and settlements that local governments paid to people who were bitten, which are often available through city or county attorneys’ offices.
Use-of-force data can also be a good place to start. Andrew Fan at the Invisible Institute in Chicago had been looking at big-city departments’ tallies of how often they used force and in what circumstances. When he analyzed what he saw in Indianapolis, he was struck by several trends, including one involving K-9 units: “what seemed to be a lot of bites.” A team of reporters collected and analyzed similar data for the police departments in the 20 largest cities in the United States, and adjusted it for population size. They also went back to each agency to fact-check the results.
One caveat: not all agencies keep this data, and they don’t keep it the same way. For decades, the federal government has been trying to encourage law enforcement agencies to collect and share information on incidents that result in death or bodily injury or involve the discharge of a firearm. But only about 40 percent are doing so, according to the FBI.
You can also try requesting K-9 specific records. We asked dozens of departments for information about how often they used police dogs and how often the dogs bit people. There is no standard way for keeping these records, though, and what we got back was all over the map. Deployment data turned out to be particularly tricky; some departments defined deployment as having a dog on the scene, even if the animal never left its handler’s vehicle; others said a dog was deployed only if it chased and caught a suspect. In the end, we focused only on the number of bites. For a detailed walk-through of how we collected, analyzed and bullet-proofed the data, you can take a look at this video produced by The Marshall Project’s data editor, David Eads. We also requested departmental policies on canine use; those with vague language suggested that some departments gave officers a lot of leeway and were probably worth a close look.
Reviewing underlying documents can be the most time-consuming part of the process. We collected incident reports, affidavits, arrest reports and, when possible, video footage for the cases we examined. What agencies must disclose through public records requests varies a lot by state; Arizona requires law enforcement to release a lot, Alabama in practice allows agencies to keep information under wraps. For departments with a lot of bites, reviewing and organizing the documents can be daunting; Ryan Martin of IndyStar and Dana Brozost-Kelleher of the Invisible Institute spent almost a year digging into records from the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department.
Understanding context can be a challenge. K-9 units have their own customs, traditions and language. Dogs live with their handlers and are often treated as trusted partners and family members. Understanding that emotional bond, and the training the dogs and handlers go though, is important. VanSickle recommends trying to find an agency or kennel that will allow you to observe dogs as they are being trained. She also suggests talking to former K-9 officers who have become expert witnesses in court. Whether they tend to testify for the police or for plaintiffs, these experts “have seen hundreds of cases, speak the language and can translate it for juries,” she says.
Finding and interviewing dog-bite victims takes patience and tact. Many people who have been bitten by police dogs describe it as extremely traumatic and are unwilling to revisit the experience; we had the most success in reaching them when we used family or lawyers as intermediaries. But some were eager to tell their stories in hopes that it will help change the way police use dogs in the future. Videos of police dog attacks and photos of the terrible injuries they inflict can be shocking. We published videos and photos only when the victims agreed.
Prepare for some push-back. It’s hard for people to understand how severe police-dog bites can be, which is why we ended up publishing videos shot by bystanders as well as from police dashboard- and body-cameras. The recorded scenes clash with the public image of the dogs that many departments promote.
“The police dog has a heroic mythology about it,” says Martin of IndyStar. “Sometimes I can feel like a spoilsport. And I love dogs.”
Police dog attack leads to $325K settlement