The City of San Diego was just forced to settle a lawsuit brought by a man who was bitten by a police dog while police stood by and did nothing.
The man was walking in a La Jolla canyon in the early hours of August 15, 2015 when the attack occurred.
Dorian Hargrove, of The San Diego Reader reports the following:
According to the April 2016 complaint, police encountered San Antonio resident David Aceves in the middle of the night, walking naked through a canyon park in La Jolla. According to police, Aceves, 26, was visibly disoriented. Police officers released their police dog to subdue Aceves. The police dog bit him on the leg, resulting in what doctors called a “large degloving injury,” in which a large piece of skin was torn from the underlying tissue. Aceves underwent multiple procedures and was required to stay in the hospital for more than two weeks.
On November 10, 2016, attorneys for Aceves and the city confirmed that a settlement was in the works and more time was needed to reach the final terms. Both sides agreed to submit a request for dismissal to the court no later than December 12.
The upcoming settlement is yet another instance where the use of police dogs in San Diego has been questioned in court.
In September of this year, a federal appellate court agreed to rehear an excessive-force lawsuit against San Diego’s police force for siccing a canine on a woman while she slept in her Pacific Beach office. In that case, as reported by Courthouse News Service, Sarah Lowry went out for drinks in Pacific Beach after finishing work. Instead of driving home, Lowry returned to her office to sleep, inadvertently tripping a burglar alarm in the building as she did. Officers arrived at the scene and after not finding any burglars, they released their police canine, Bak. Bak found Lowry sleeping on an office couch and attacked. The dog bit Lowry on the lip, causing a large gash and severe bleeding.
A police officer at the scene, according to the report, later stated that Lowry was “very lucky” Bak did not rip her face off.
A judge on the appellate court wrote that while the use of police dogs serve a needed purpose, the use and severity of injuries should also be considered in such cases.
“In this case we must not rely on the plaintiff’s ‘luck’ that she only ended up bleeding profusely from a cut lip rather than having her whole face ‘ripped off’ to excuse the conduct that the officer himself recognized could well have resulted in a far more egregious injury,” read the majority opinion.
Watch the video and see for yourself how insane this was…
The city of San Diego decided finally to pay David Aceves a $385,000 settlement last week, even though they claimed they were not in the wrong.
In another case similar to this, a homeless man, Stanley McQuery, reported that an officer unleashed a police dog on him while ordering the dog to “eat him up” sadistically, while he stood by and watched. McQuery said he felt like he was being treated like a “runaway slave.”
Source: http://countercurrentnews.info/2016/12/san-diego-cops-allow-police-dog/