Some of the dog-bite injuries appear relatively minor, but others were so severe they required surgery. One canine tore off a man’s lip. Another punctured the scalp of an 8-year-old boy after biting an officer and an intruder. A third dog ripped into the arm of a mentally ill, drug-addicted man — who was twice apprehended by Richmond police dogs in 15 months — as his mother watched from behind her sliding glass door.

“It was horrible, horrible, to see my son get eaten up,” said Latonya Walker, who had called police on him during an altercation.

“Everybody’s going to say he deserves it. I say he didn’t, and I’m the mother.”

Richmond police and some city leaders consider their canine handlers heroes who unflinchingly charge into danger in a city plagued by street violence.

Police reason that a dog bite is better than a bullet — who would argue that? — and sending in canines protects officers from closer, potentially more violent encounters. But for a tactic that is fraught with searing images from the civil rights era and can cause deep physical and psychological scars, exactly how and when dogs should be deployed is open for debate.

Community advocates say they welcome that kind of discussion, which is only now becoming possible in California through the disclosures of once-secret police affidavits, firearms and Taser reports, witness and officer transcripts, photos and videos, and internal affairs investigations. Finally, the state has “pulled back the veil” on police use of force, they say, allowing informed discussion of whether it’s justified or not.

“This is fairly basic information that was just completely off the table from the public’s point of view until 2019” when SB 1421 went into effect, said David Snyder, executive director of the First Amendment Coalition, which joined in the legal fight for the records in Richmond and other cities. “So now the public can see these cases, and they can decide for themselves whether departments are handling them appropriately.”

Many police departments and unions in the state, however, aren’t on board. As the California Reporting Project has found, more than 173 agencies — representing 84% of the state’s sworn officers — have failed to fully respond to requests for use-of-force records from the coalition of news organizations. They are dragging out their responses, claiming it is too “burdensome” to gather and review the records, or — as Richmond did initially — insisting that many injuries their officers cause are simply too minor to require their release.

In the face of this resistance, individual news organizations are fighting selected agencies. And they’re winning, as long as they’re willing to invest time and money on the battles.

In San Jose, the police department said in the fall of 2019 it would take four years to disclose 75 use-of-force cases requested by this news organization. After it was sued, the department completed the release of most of those records in five months.

In Los Angeles, the sheriff’s department by late June had released only a small fraction of more than 6,000 case files first requested by the Los Angeles Times more than two years earlier. A judge gave the department 90 days to hand over what the Times sought, but six months later, journalists are still waiting for many of those records.

And in Oakland, police officials who had stalled the release of 33 use-of-force cases since early 2019 attempted to convince a judge of their good faith last spring with the 11th-hour disclosure of nearly 4,000 pages of still images from body camera videos — while continuing to withhold the videos themselves. Unimpressed, the judge gave the Oakland PD six months to deliver the rest.

Other battles are continuing around California, and many seem far from resolution. But in a state with more than 115,000 officers, Richmond stands as a case study in what communities can learn about their police through SB 1421, if only officials will agree — or are forced — to follow the law.

What Richmond reveals

Sitting on the eastern edge of the San Francisco Bay just north of Oakland and Berkeley, this city of 110,000 is home to a Chevron refinery, the national Rosie the Riveter Museum and a violent crime rate that is more than double the national average.

Tensions bubble up between police and community activists, but they all agree the department has come a long way from the 1980s when the city was slapped with a historic police brutality judgment over a group of rogue officers who called themselves “The Cowboys.”

By 2015, under former Police Chief Chris Magnus, the city was lauded by the Obama administration for its community policing efforts and in 2018 was praised in a U.S. Commission on Civil Rights report for significantly decreasing its use of force without increasing officer fatalities.

Through SB 1421, however, a fuller picture emerges. Under a court order in the media lawsuit, Richmond Police released documents on 122 cases from 2014 through 2019 involving officers who cut, bludgeoned, tackled, tased, shot or commanded dogs to attack suspects, resulting in significant injuries.

Two of the cases detailed fatal police shootings that were investigated by the Contra Costa County District Attorney and publicized at the time. Four other times Richmond police were involved in nonfatal shootings. In 14 cases, they fired Tasers that caused significant injury.

But the majority of cases described the dozens of largely unknown violent encounters of the department’s canine squad. Hodges and his dog Gunnar injured people in 17 cases, including seven each in 2018 and 2019, according to the review.

Officer Michael Brown was involved in 13 cases that caused injuries, including three in the span of one week in February 2018. Four other Richmond officers and their police dogs were involved in at least five incidents each.

A Bay Area News Group analysis of the new Richmond records and other available use-of-force disclosures revealed:

• Police dogs typically do more harm than other nonlethal uses of force. Canine contact was four times more likely to result in great bodily injury than the use of a Taser, one of the department’s other most common types of force.
• Officers often use dogs before threats are clear. More than 80% of the people bitten by dogs were either hiding or running from police; more than 60% were found unarmed.
• Black people are disproportionate targets. More than half of those bitten by police dogs were described in police reports as Black, among the 65 cases in which a person’s race was noted, although they make up only 20% of Richmond’s population.

The number of police dog attacks uncovered in the newly released records and the damage they had inflicted came as a surprise to Randy Joseph, chairman of Richmond’s Community Police Review Commission that investigates complaints of excessive force.

“That wasn’t even on our radar. None of these cases made the light of day,” said Joseph, who also works as the facilities director at a local youth center. “It’s mind-blowing for me.”

Most attacks ‘within policy’

There are no national standards when it comes to canine policies. Instead, they vary from one city to the next. Richmond’s policy allows officers to deploy dogs whenever officers believe a suspect has committed or threatened to commit “any serious offense,” and when a person “poses an imminent threat of violence,” is “resisting or threatening to resist arrest,” or is hiding in a place that would be dangerous for officers to enter. “Mere flight from pursuing officers shall not serve as good cause for the use of a canine to apprehend an individual,” the policy says.

Across the county line, Oakland’s policy appears to be stricter, allowing officers to deploy dogs only for a “forcible violent crime, burglary, or weapons related offense.” And Oakland reports far fewer dog bite cases than Richmond — 13 from 2015-2019, according to a review of the canine squad by the department’s inspector general.

Both cities require a ranking officer to give approval before a dog is let loose, and the handler must alert suspects about the dog, giving them a chance to surrender.

In Richmond, the vast majority of dog bite cases, internally reviewed every month by a use-of-force committee, were deemed within department policy — even at times when it appeared a suspect tried to surrender or when a dog attacked the wrong person.

That’s what happened during a graveyard shift in August 2014, when Officer Kristian Palma and his Belgian Malinois, Ronin, were hunting for a man accused of assaulting his wife and driving toward officers before crashing and running off as police opened fire.

When the dog homed in on a nearby tool shed, scratching and barking at the door, Palma warned he was letting Ronin inside. The dog pounced on a person concealed under a sheet on the floor, latching his jaws on the man’s arm.

But it wasn’t the suspect.

It was a retired police officer from Mexico who was visiting family and sleeping in their shed. He was treated for bite wounds at Kaiser hospital.

“Based on all the facts gathered before and during the search, there was no way for Officer Palma to not believe that the suspect was not inside the shed,” Richmond Police Lt. Felix Tan wrote in an internal review that cleared Palma.

In another case revealed in the newly released records, there was no apparent “serious offense” when police observed a man walking across Nevin Park in January 2015. He acted “suspicious,” the police report says, and when the man started running away, an officer thought he saw a gun in his waistband. Only later, after Officer Alexander Caine sicced his dog Ranger on the man hiding in a backyard, causing nine injuries to his chest, arms and hip, did police find out the man had a warrant out for his arrest for robbery. It was Caine and Ranger’s third bite in just over three weeks. Despite an “extensive search,” the report said, no gun was found.

“The arrest was necessary for public safety,” Sgt. Esteban Barragan wrote in his report. “And all the actions and decisions regarding the use of police canine were within department policy.”

A rare rebuke

The records do show, however, one time when Richmond determined a canine officer violated department policy.

In April 2018, Hodges was counseled after unleashing Gunnar on a man suspected of stealing a generator from Home Depot. A witness “who could only watch in horror” came forward to report Hodges sent Gunnar to attack a man who “did exactly what he was asked without resisting,” according to a citizen’s complaint revealed through the transparency law.

Alone and waiting for backup, Hodges let the dog loose, as the suspect lay face down, police records and body-camera video footage show. Hodges said he feared the man could pull a weapon and was preparing to flee, and an internal review by Richmond Police called Hodges’ decision a “great option given the circumstances.”

But the review found Hodges neglected something crucial.

“Officer Hodges’ failure to provide an audible warning prior to releasing his police canine is a serious offense,” a Richmond Police captain wrote, recommending a reprimand that instead was reduced to a requirement for more training. “Currently, there are at least seven court rulings that state it is unreasonable for a police officer to utilize a police canine without providing a warning” except in cases when suspects are deemed armed and dangerous.

Officers found a construction knife in the man’s waistband and two bullets in his pocket, police reports said, but he did not brandish the weapon during the encounter.

It was the fourth time in about three months that Hodges and Gunnar had turned up in use-of-force reports. During that stretch, the Kiwanis Club would honor Hodges — for the first of three consecutive times — as Richmond’s Officer of the Year.

The distinction is deserved, said Ben Therriault, president of the Richmond Police Officers Association, who praises Hodges as one of the city’s most active officers in arrests and firearms recoveries.

“He’s what you’d call a good street cop,” Therriault said, “and there’s not a lot of us left doing that work.”

‘We are here for the victims’

There is prestige and honor in serving as one of Richmond’s canine handlers. On a crisp fall afternoon, Hodges and three other canine officers and their dogs ran through practice drills on a grassy field, searching for a human decoy in a padded suit hiding in a shed.

The group meets twice a month to practice what they call “manwork,” training their dogs to search for and bite suspected criminals. The officers call out commands in Dutch and German, the common languages now for specially bred and trained police dogs.

“We don’t want our dogs to do great bodily injury. We don’t want them to permanently hurt someone or scar someone,” said Hodges, with Gunnar patiently sitting at his side. “However, we are here for the victims of these crimes. And we can’t let these suspects stay hiding, especially on these residential blocks. And it’s just the safest, safest way. We don’t want anyone to get hurt or severely injured. But at the same time, it keeps us safe. It keeps our citizens safe.”

From what Paul Murphy has seen, the canine units are a vital part of protecting Richmond businesses like his. He has called police more than once to respond to break-ins at his Goody Goody shoe store on 23rd Street.

“The police gave anyone in there complete and ample warning. They will yell over and over before they let that dog go,” Murphy said. Even if the dog causes serious injury, “my feeling is that if that saved one officer’s life, it was completely worth it.”

Sure enough, the records highlight dozens of times that police dogs brought down clearly dangerous suspects. In 2014, Ranger helped arrest a man who had put a gun to the head of a taxi driver during a robbery. Hodges points to a recent case where a shooting suspect hid so far under a house’s crawl space that he would never have been found without Gunnar’s sense of smell.

“We use a canine a lot, but we don’t get a lot of officer-involved shootings,” said Sgt. Daniel Reina, who supervises the canine unit. His officers often point to the high-profile death of Stephon Clark, shot by Sacramento police in his grandmother’s backyard in 2018 when officers mistook his cell phone for a gun. “So would I rather use a dog versus having someone shot and killed? All day long. You may have some injuries, but they’re not going to be dead.”

Too many dog bites?

Police Chief Bisa French is quick to defend the canine program. French was interviewed over the summer, before being placed on leave in October when she was accused of threatening a family member and her boyfriend over allegations he was pimping the woman. French denies making such threats.