The City Where Someone Was Bitten by a Police Dog Every 5 Days
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.
Mauled
When police dogs are weapons
A series on the damage police dogs inflict on Americans, published in collaboration with AL.com, IndyStar and the Invisible Institute.
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The City Where Someone Was Bitten by a Police Dog Every 5 Days
5 takeaways from our investigation of Indianapolis police dogs
Police dogs bite thousands every year in the U.S. Few ever get justice.
6 takeaways from our national investigation
Were you bitten? Tell us your story
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She went out for a walk. Then she encountered a police dog.
How a run of bites brought the FBI to a small town in Alabama.
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.
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
