For all that Police dogs are often anthromorphised as their Officer’s ‘partner’ the fact is that their role on the front line of Policing is not as a companion, but as a tool for tracking and, if necessary, attacking. A taser gun is a weapon which takes no pleasure in what it does, but a Police dog is; trained to channel their ancestral hunting urges into tracking, chasing, biting and hence detaining criminal suspects. The Police dog is therefore a weapon which must be used with the utmost caution, especially as the biting injuries they inflict can leave horrendous scars.
“Not Had A Bite For Weeks”: A Case Study
One evening in the early summer of 2020, my client Harry, a student then aged 18, and a small group of his friends walked onto the playing field of their former primary school. The lads did nothing untoward; they were simply reminiscing as they walked around the field; it was a nostalgia trip. They had been able to gain access to the school field via a large, old, and well-known gap in the fencing that separated the field from a public footpath.
Unbeknownst to Harry and his friends, they had been spotted by a local resident who put two and two together, got five and then made a call to the Police.
Police patrols arrived in the area, including a Police dog team.
By this time, Harry and his friends were already on their way back out of the school grounds, having entered an area of undergrowth which separated the field from the public footpath.
From the other side of the fence, on the footpath, the Police dog evidently detected their scent. The dog was now close to the gap in the fence and by his behaviour was indicating to his handler that there were people in the undergrowth.
Harry heard a voice say “Police! Come out!” In obedience with this instruction, Harry and his friends continued walking towards the gap in the fence, which was their intended exit point in any event.
However, without waiting for them to emerge, the Police Officer now shouted “Come out now, the dog is coming over! Get him! Get him! Get him!” whilst simultaneously releasing the Police dog through the fence.
To be entirely clear, a period of only 20 seconds had elapsed between the Officer issuing the first command to Harry and his friends to ‘come out’ and then issuing the second command, which was for his dog to locate, bite and thereby detain the target.
The Police dog approached Harry at speed, whilst Harry was still walking towards the gap in the fence in order to follow the first ‘come out’ instruction.
The Police dog bit Harry on his right thigh, which immediately caused him to go down in shock and pain onto one knee.
The dog then released Harry’s leg and instead bit him on his upper left arm and lower shoulder, forcing him face down on to the leaf- littered ground.
The Police dog pinned Harry to the ground, while continuing to bite into his shoulder and repeatedly shook him in a violent manner.
Harry was in fear of aggravating the dog further and attempted to lie still on the ground, while the Police dog continued biting his shoulder and shaking him.
Harry sensibly did not resist or attempt to defend himself against the Police dog in any way – believing that a submissive approach would minimise any further injury he might suffer.
Within seconds, the Police Officer himself arrived on the scene, shouting at Harry to “Keep fucking still” and calling him a “Fucking idiot”.
Eventually the Police dog released his grip on Harry who was left in a state of shock, bleeding from several wounds. The Officer declared Harry his “Prisoner” but did not formally arrest him, nor attempt to ascertain who he was – nor show him any compassion.
Instead, the Officer just ordered Harry to continue walking towards the footpath, which was of course where he had been going in the first place, sending him on his way with another abusive, and contradictory, instruction – “You fucking make any moves you get bitten again!”
In the meantime, the Police dog had moved onto another of Harry’s friends who was lying in the undergrowth nearby, and also bit him. The Police Officer then noticed the remainder of the group of friends and after also threatening them “If you fucking move, you get bitten” instructed them to move towards the footpath, where other Police Officers awaited.
On exiting through the gap in the fence onto the footpath, Harry was immediately confronted by a number of Officers, one of whom handcuffed him and told him that he was being “detained” but provided absolutely no further information to justify this i.e. Harry was not informed that the Officers were arresting him on suspicion of any criminal offence, and nor was he told that they were exercising Stop and Search powers. All Police powers of detention require such explanations to be given to the subject, if it is at all reasonably practical to do so, otherwise they are illegitimate; an essential safeguard against arbitrary authoritarianism and abuse of power. But Harry was understandably too shell-shocked by what had happened to challenge the Officers, as they rode roughshod over his rights in this manner.
In pain from his injuries, particularly the deep bites he had suffered to his left shoulder, Harry was led away and made to stand near a Police vehicle on the adjacent street whilst his friends were also handcuffed and detained.
Harry was then ‘frisked’, again without any legal basis for a search being stated or explained to him.
The Officers partially cut away Harry’s clothing to look at his upper body injuries and took photographs of them. Harry gained the distinct impression that these photographs were not going to be used as part of any legal process, but instead were being taken as some sort of trophy or souvenir by the Officer.
The Officers did not examine the injuries to Harry’s leg, and they did not offer any first aid at all for any of his injuries.
Instead one of the Officers merely commented to Harry that he had “seen worse” dog bites.
Harry’s handcuffs had been removed, and he now began to feel dizzy and light headed and had to sit down.
The assembled Officers continued to say that Harry’s injuries were not serious and attempted to joke about the incident. Harry also heard an Officer – whom he suspected was the dog handler – remarking that the Police dog would be happy as he had “not had a bite for weeks”.
The dog handling Officer then gave Harry a ‘bite information card’. Harry felt sick and was in a lot of pain, as well as shock. He did not want a piece of paper, he wanted an ambulance and he told the Officers this.
They did agree to call an ambulance for him, but Harry was then told that the Officers had cancelled it and had decided to take him, as well as his companion who had also been bitten, to the hospital themselves, where they duly deposited him.
As Harry walked into the A&E Department at the hospital, one of the Officers who had driven him there called after him to point out that Harry’s right leg was bleeding.
Harry’s injuries were initially treated in the A&E Department, where he first required an x-ray and a tetanus booster injection; then due to the severity of his injuries, he was transferred to another hospital for assessment by a specialist Plastic Surgeon.
Harry’s wounds were washed out and sutured under local anaesthetic. Although he was discharged from hospital the same day, he was required to take antibiotics and attend wound check ups. He experienced pain and tenderness from his wound for a period of three months whilst they healed, during which time he was unable to properly exercise and he developed a, thankfully temporary, aversion to dogs whenever he saw one.
He was, however, left with permanent, albeit pale, scar marks on his upper left arm and his left shoulder blade region. Whilst generally hidden by his clothing, these marks will be with him for the rest of his life.
Approximately 10 days after the incident, Harry submitted a Police complaint.
Sadly, his complaint was treated with the lack of seriousness and the short shrift that Police Professional Standards Departments (PSD) will always try to get away with if they can.
Only seven days after he lodged his complaint, Harry received a response from PSD which stated as follows –
“With regards your complaint a decision has been made that no further investigation will take place at this time. The review by Professional Standards has determined that the deployment of the police dog was lawful and proportionate.
As your complaint has been appropriately dealt with through the logging process, we will not have any further contact with you about this matter and there is no right of review against the outcome.”
Whilst Harry was denied a right of review in terms of his complaint, the Police should not have invested those words with quite the sense of self-satisfaction and finality that they did; because Harry still very much had the right to sue the Police for what they had done to him, and this is what he sought my expert opinion upon.
Police Dogs & Misuse of Force
It cannot be disputed that Harry and his friends were on private property (a school field) when the Police were called; however, they were merely walking around, talking between themselves at a time when the premises were completely deserted and trespass itself is not a crime. It is a tort (civil wrong) but you can effectively only be sued for it if you have caused the owner/occupier of the land some discernible loss or damage. This was manifestly not the case here.
You cannot be arrested for trespass, because it is not a crime, and this would explain why even at the beginning of the incident no attempt was made to arrest Harry and his friends by any of the Officers involved.
In that context, the use of force by the Police dog handler in this case was an absolute travesty, being a totally disproportionate and excessive response to a situation which did not in fact require any use of force at all.
Police dogs are highly trained animals, with different ‘operational modes’ depending upon the instructions which they are given by their handler, and the situation which confronts them. They have a number of very useful roles to play in supporting the functions of the Police, which do not at all involve use of force and these include the following:
- tracking scents
- searching for suspects or vulnerable persons
- searching for property/evidence.
However, Police Dogs obeying an instruction to ‘attack’ are also weapons and in that context constitute one of the most frightening and extreme types of ‘anti- personnel’ force which the Police have in their arsenal.
In a case in which there were unknown people present on school premises, it may well have been appropriate to use a Police dog to locate them, and indeed this was what was done when the Police dog on the footpath detected the scent of Harry and his friends. As it happened, Harry and his friends were voluntarily exiting the undergrowth, and in doing so were complying with the only Police instructions they had been given. Nevertheless, it might still have been appropriate to send the Police dog to find them if more time had gone by, and they had not in fact presented themselves to the Police outside the premises.
In this respect, a Police dog can be sent to search for potential suspects in a manner that does not have to end in violence. Police dogs are trained when searching for people, to initially locate and ‘guard’ the person that they find with a show of force i.e. barking, that same barking simultaneously functioning as a signal to bring their handler to the scene. When a Police dog is sent to perform such a task it is specifically trained not to attack the suspect unless the suspect attacks the dog, or is perceived by the dog as attempting to ‘escape.’
In a terrifyingly short period of time between his first becoming aware of persons in the undergrowth, and without giving them any realistic chance to comply with the command issued – to exit the undergrowth and show themselves – the Police Officer in this case jumped straight to a use of force deployment of his dog. The body camera footage (which I swiftly took steps to obtain from the Police on Harry’s behalf) confirmed that the period of time between the first command and the Officer releasing his dog in attack mode was only 20 seconds.
Whilst entirely blind as to who was in the dark and undergrowth, and without any evidence of threat from or the commission of a criminal offence by those persons, the Police Officer released his dog into the wooded area with the command “Get him, get him, get him” which is a deployment termed ‘Chase and Attack’.
Police dogs are selected for their “high prey drive” which means they like to chase a fleeing target, channelling their ancestral wolfish instincts of the hunt.
What the Police dog handler in this case could have done – if he genuinely felt that he could not wait any longer for the persons in the undergrowth to show themselves – would have been to release his dog to commence a search only, as described above, with a shouted warning to any persons in the vicinity, such as this (taken from the “Police dog’s Training and Care Manual 2002”) – “I am now releasing the dog. When it finds you, for your own safety you must remain still and quiet and you will come to no harm”.
Evidently, the Officer did not do this. Instead he specifically sent his dog not merely to locate but to attack the unknown persons in the undergrowth, which turned out to be Harry and his friends.
The Police dog would have fully understood the instruction “Get him!” to be an instruction to chase and detain a fleeing suspect by biting. Harry had not been told to stand still – he had been told to ‘come out’ and so was a moving target as the dog approached, and in the dog’s eyes, no doubt a ‘fleeing suspect’ who needed to be bitten.
The dog cannot be criticised for acting in accordance with its training, any more than a taser gun can be criticised for firing when its trigger is pulled; but in all such cases the Officer must be able to justify the use of force as reasonable and proportionate – and in Harry’s case I strongly felt that he could not.
The Police dog handler had completely mishandled this situation:
1. He had instructed unidentified people – who had certainly not been positively identified as offenders – to come out i.e. not to stand still but rather to keep moving (which they were doing), and then
2. within a matter of seconds he released his dog with specific instruction to attack and detain any persons who were moving in the undergrowth.
My great familiarity with incidents of Police violence leads me to attribute what happened in this case as result of the Officer’s ‘excitement’ at playing ‘cops and robbers’, blowing up a minor situation beyond all proportion – just like tasering someone in the back after the most minor of altercations.
Sadly, it seems that in Police dog teams, it is not only the animal whose blood can be got up by the thrill of the hunt.
The Police Officer had no idea who was in that wood, and no evidence that any crime had been committed, that any threat was posed or any reasonable basis to believe the ‘suspects’ were fleeing. If he thought they were fleeing, he should have issued them with a command to stand still and released his dog in the first instance to detain them with bark not bite – but instead he went straight for the ‘kill’.
As it happened, Harry and his friends were older teenagers, but given the nature of the premises, it is entirely possible that a group of children could have been in those woods. The Police Officer had no idea at all who he was setting his dog upon.
And finally, let us not forget that this particular Police use of force – the deployment of a Police dog – is very different from the majority of other forms of ‘weaponry’. The searing pain caused by a CS gas spray is intense but transitory; even bruising caused by baton strikes generally fade, but the powerful bite and tearing jaws of a Police dog can cause life-changing injuries and will leave indelible scars.
In all the circumstances therefore, I am very satisfied to have pursued Harry’s claim against the Police to a successful conclusion. Following the commencement of Court proceedings, the Police denial of liability has been replaced by an agreement to pay my client damages of £17,500 plus his legal costs.
My client’s name has been changed.
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