Man bites dog ( squad): ‘ This shouldn’t be happening’
The Vancouver police department dog squad is the oldest municipal squad in Canada — operational since 1959. So innovative was it considered to be that the squad’s makeup and training methods became a template for other city forces. For decades, the VPD dog squad made news for captures, riot control and – in one highly memorable event – a full dress funeral for a police dog killed in action.
But of late, the VPD dog squad has been in the news for the wrong reasons.
A couple of well- publicized stories of people being severely bitten brought new scrutiny to the dog squad’s methods. One of the cases involved a suspect who was bitten so severely on his leg that emergency hospital personnel told him the bite almost severed an artery and could have resulted in his death.
It resulted, instead, in a civil suit being filed against the City of Vancouver and two police officers.
The Pivot Legal Society, which helped file the suit, has campaigned for the last couple of years to have the dog squad change its tactics and training methods. Pivot claims they have resulted in too many severe biting incidents.
“[ Last] week,” wrote Pivot lawyer Douglas King, in a Feb. 23 opinion piece for The Sun, “the provincial Office of the Police Complaint Commissioner confirmed that the Vancouver police department has had at least 121 incidents within the last two years where a police dog made contact with a suspect and caused injuries severe enough to require hospitalization.”
The problem, the Pivot lawyers argue, is in the dog squad training methods. At present, the squad employs the bite- and-hold method of training. But cities like Los Angeles, which abandoned the bite- and- hold method after it decided the number of injuries the dog squad caused was unacceptably high, switched to the harass- and- delay method. In it, the dog uses its stature and barking to stop a suspect, and only resorts to biting if the suspect attempts to flee or attacks the dog or its handler. The number of hospitalizations attributed to dog squad bites dropped precipitously in L. A. — from 639 between 1988- 91 to 66 between 1991- 94.
In response to the Pivot complaints, the VPD stated in a recent report to the Vancouver police board it was not convinced there was a problem or need for reform.
But at least one dog person doesn’t agree with the VPD, and that dog person was one of the VPD’S own.
Pat Laughy, who is now 68, joined the VPD dog squad in 1973. He would rise to become sergeant head supervisor/ trainer of the squad. He would leave the squad two years later in 1977 because, he said, he “felt the squad wasn’t getting the support from upstairs.” He would go back to patrol and leave the force four years later. In private life, he started his own kennel and founded a security dog business.
He decided to comment publicly about the squad, he said, because of the bad press.
“They’ve [ the squad] lost expertise somewhere,” he said. “This shouldn’t be happening.
“It upsets me for a couple of reasons:
“One, [ there is] the number of [ dog] bites they’ve had in the last two years. There was no way we were getting that number of bites when I was on the squad.” ( Laughy said that during his time on the squad, there might be two or three cases a year of bites that needed ‘ remedial action.’)
“Two, there is the amount of damage done by the dogs.”
Laughy referred to the recent lawsuit. It involved 33- year- old Christopher Evans who, frustrated that several city buses passed him by while he waited near Clark Drive, broke a bus window with his skateboard. In the subsequent encounter with the police dog, he was bitten in the thigh and calf, and required nearly 100 staples to close the wounds.
“Is it justifiable,” Laughy said, “to give a guy the number of stitches he did for acting like an idiot? That’s a decision the dog can’t make.”
According to Evans’ account, the pursuing officer was about 10 metres away at the time. Laughy wondered why the officer didn’t have closer control of the dog.
During the interview, Laughy reiterated that he had no close knowledge of the squad’s present training methods. He had been too long out of the force to comment on those methods or the way they were employed in the field, he said. But the bad press and the number of incidents, he felt, indicated a loss of focus.
“That’s what pisses me off,” he said. “There’s something been lost here somewhere.”