For Bradley Brock, his 3-year-old dog, a mastiff named Moose, was his family and his support after a serious motorcycle accident. In a span of seconds on a November night last year, a police officer in Inkster, Michigan, took all of that from Brock when the officer shot Moose multiple times as the dog approached him.
Brock says, and video appears to show, the dog wagging its tail as it trots toward the officer. Brock has now filed a federal civil rights lawsuit arguing that the shooting was an unreasonable seizure under the Fourth Amendment.
The shooting is another alleged instance of an officer misreading dog behavior and slaying a pet—a sadly common occurrence that continues to devastate families, generate public outrage, lead to officers being fired, and cost police departments hundreds of thousands of dollars in lawsuit settlements.
Brock says he called 911 on November 15 of last year after a man at a gas station pulled a gun on him. Video of the incident shows an Inkster police officer talking to Brock while Moose sits on the sidewalk a short distance away, off leash. Moose then trots over to Brock, wagging his tail and stopping to sniff a passing pedestrian, before turning and moving toward the officer.
"He was very friendly, but if anybody was around me, he wanted to check 'em out and make sure they're okay," Brock says. "That's all, like any dog."
However, the officer begins quickly backpedaling, draws his gun, and within seconds shoots the dog multiple times.
Brock, escorted by police, took Moose to an emergency veterinarian, where the dog was euthanized. The veterinarian report notes that the Inkster police left immediately after dropping Moose off and "refused to give account of what happened."
The loss of his dog crushed Brock. He had lost one of his legs in a motorcycle accident several years earlier, and he was training Moose to be his service dog. Brock says Moose was a rescue dog who was caged and abused for the first six months of his life.
Brock v Inkster 2:22-cv-10500"When I got him, he had no hair from the middle of his back to the tip of his tail," Brock says. "They had run over his head with a truck, and it crushed his jaw and caused him to bite the tip of his tongue off. He was highly abused, so when I got him, I healed him as much as he healed me. We were partners."
The only reason footage of the incident exists is because a security guard at a nearby marijuana dispensary captured it on video via a drone he had in the air at the time. The Inkster Police Department told local news outlets that the officer's body camera wasn't turned on, nor was the dash camera in his cruiser active.
Brock says the dispensary initially refused to give him the video, but he later ran into the security guard, Antonio Williams, by chance. Williams sympathized with Brock and handed over the footage.
"The video clearly shows the dog was not aggressive," Williams told WXYZ Detroit. "The officer pulled his weapon and I don't know how many times he fired because I was busy wondering where the bullets were going."
Williams was fired from his job for sharing the footage with Brock, but he told WXYZ that he had no regrets.