U.S. Supreme Court refuses to overturn right to sue police who shoot dogs
WASHINGTON D.C. ––The United States Supreme Court on December 5, 2005 refused to review an April 2005 ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that law enforcement officers have a duty to consider alternatives to shooting dogs.
The appellate court refused to block a lawsuit brought by seven Hell’s Angels motorcycle club members against seven San Jose police officers and a Santa Clara County sheriff’s deputy.
The Hell’s Angels contend that their civil rights were violated when the police officers and sheriff’s deputy in January 1998 shot a Rottweiler and two other dogs while raiding two homes in search of evidence pertaining to the 1997 fatal beating of a man at the Pink Poodle nightclub in San Jose.
The appellate verdict noted that the raid was planned in advance. Though the investigators “had a week to consider the options and tactics available for an encounter with the dogs,” the verdict pointed out, they “failed to develop a realistic plan for incapacitating the dogs other than shooting them.”
The original case will now proceed to trial.
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruling followed a 1994 decision by the same court that reversed a lower court verdict and held that killing a pet without urgent necessity violates the Fourth Amendment, protecting citizens against unreasonable search and seizure.
The case remained in court until 1998. Eventually the city of Richmond, California paid James Fuller and family $525,000 in damages and legal fees resulting from a 1991 incident in which police officers shot the Fuller family dog while chasing a burglary suspect through the Fullers’ yard. The suspect had no relationship to the Fullers.
Parallel case
A parallel case may soon be filed in Richmond, San Fran-cisco Chronicle columnist Chip Johnson reported on December 9, after the Richmond police department internal affairs unit exonerated three officers who shot a pit bull terrier named Blu eleven times with pistols and a shotgun under similar circumstances.
The July 2005 Richmond shooting also involved a dog and yard not belonging to a suspect the police were seeking. This time the dog was confined behind a fence until the police opened the gate.
Reviewing police use of firearms, Douglas Quan of the Riverside Press-Enterprise revealed on November 6, 2005 that from 2000 to 2004, “The records of the Riverside and San Bernardino police and county sheriff’s departments show that when officers intentionally fired their guns, they were aiming at an animal––typically a dog––49% to 67% of the time. During that period, the two sheriff’s departments recorded 162 animal shootings. The Riverside and San Bernardino police departments recorded 61.”
Most of the shootings involved pit bull terriers or Rottweilers, Quan found. Often the dogs were used to guard premises used for criminal activity, but in at least four cases dogs were shot when police raided the wrong address, or failed to determine that the dogs belonged to the victims of reported crimes in progress, not the perpetrators.