Biting Taxpayers

County spends $4,500 to settle case where police dog attacked security guard.

Late one evening three years ago, Bryan Sanderson, a 26-year-old security guard, was on duty at a north Spokane U-Haul lot when he heard a suspicious noise. He got out of his car to investigate and was quickly overwhelmed by a Spokane County Sheriff’s Office police dog, a German Shepherd named Leif, who clamped his teeth into Sanderson’s right arm and brought him to the ground. Sanderson wasn’t badly injured by the dog but was so shaken by the attack that he was unable to resume his job.

The Center for Justice represents Sanderson. This week CFJ reached a $4,500 out of court settlement with Spokane County to resolve the state lawsuit filed on Sanderson’s behalf. In the view of CFJ Chief Catalyst Breean Beggs, however, Sanderson’s attack by the SCSO dog is just the latest in a series of cases that should be pointing Spokane County and other police agencies in a different direction when it comes to using dogs in police work.

The problem, in Beggs’s view, is not the use of dogs by law enforcement agencies, which he supports, but the kinds of dogs that are most frequently used.

“There are two kinds of police dogs,” Beggs says. “There are the ‘bite and hold’ dogs, like German Shepherds, and then there are what I call ‘seek and circle’ dogs, like bloodhounds. The bite and hold dogs are problematic. Other than letting them loose to bite people, you can’t really control them. Once you let them loose they will grab the suspect with their teeth and hold them until the officers recall them. And once they grab someone, the opportunity for injury and trauma is real. And that’s what happened here. In this case (Sanderson’s) you have an innocent security guard being bitten by a dog until the officers got there to pull the dog off.”

In this instance, according to sheriff’s deputies reports, the decision to unloose Leif was made not on the basis of sighting a suspect, but on the basis of hearing suspicious noises inside the lot that Sanderson was guarding to prevent gasoline thefts. The deputies had been summoned to the scene in response to a silent alarm. Other than the mistakenly captured security guard, however, no other suspect was apprehended, let alone sighted.

Unless policies regarding the use of dogs in police work change, Beggs believes, incidents like this will continue to occur, not just endangering innocent people like Sanderson, but also taking a hit on taxpayers because of how judges are interpreting the state’s dog bit liability statute (RCW 16.08.040) which imposes strict liability on dog owners when their dogs bite people. Beggs notes that in three separate cases, including one the Center was previously involved in, federal judges interpreting state law have enforced the strict liability provision on municipalities whose police dogs inflicted bites.

“If we lose nothing by going with a seek and circle dog, then why not do it? If suspects are guilty of crimes, do they need to go to jail? Of course. But do we need to inflict dog bites on them besides? I don’t think so.”–CFJ lawyer Breean Beggs.

Beggs points to the testimony of Vanness Bogardus, a former canine handler for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, who CFJ has used as an expert witness in police dog cases. Bogardus sees several problems with using dogs to attack suspects, including the risks to the dog itself.

“Unlike a gun or baton,” Bogardus has written, “a dog cannot be aimed or pointed. An officer who realizes he must stop the suspect from raising his right hand that holds a weapon knows to strike at the right hand. In the same situation, the dog is incapable of making such a distinction. This is because a dog cannot think in abstracts or reason like a human being. They cannot analyze facts or form judgments like human beings. They cannot take appropriate action, if, in fact, appropriate action is necessary. The trained police dog ordered to bite will bite the suspect’s left arm he offers the dog even though the suspect holds in his right hand an ice pick or knife ready to plunge into the dog’s skull when it bites. (Dogs cannot recognize real danger like human beings can either.) This is why German Customs Police stopped training their dogs to attack and bite but, instead, trained the dogs to circle and bark. The German police lost too many dogs to suspects who let the dogs bit one arm protected by padding while the suspects used their other free arm to stab the dogs to death.”

In Spokane County, Beggs notes, law enforcement officials need only to look to the City of Cheney to see a workable alternative.

In August the Cheney Police Department acquired a young bloodhound from a South Carolina sheriff to use in tracking down suspects.

Cheney Police Chief Jeff Sale told the Cheney Free Press that he chose a less aggressive breed of dog because he was primarily concerned about liability issues.

“I did not want an aggressive dog,” Sale told the newspaper, explaining that the bloodhound could also be used to help locate lost children, elderly patients who’d wandered away from their homes, or teenagers who simply don’t want to be found.

“The idea,” says Beggs, “is to transition police departments from using bite and hold dogs to seek and circle dogs. Because unless your goal is to have the dog bite people, you get all the benefits without the injuries and liability.”

–CFJ