Police Shoot 10,000 Dogs a Year; Whether Anyone is Held Accountable Depends on the State

Lydia Nikac watched a North Carolina state trooper kill both of her dogs. A court has now ruled she can’t show anyone else what happened.Last week, a three-judge panel of the North Carolina Court of Appeals unanimously rejected Ms. Nikac’s First Amendment challenge to a judge’s order barring her from publicly sharing body camera footage of the October 2024 shooting. Ms. Nikac, a professional dog trainer, had called 911 after catching a man breaking into her car. Her two Belgian Malinois, Bonnie and Clyde, had him cornered when Trooper Justin Maness arrived. The dogs were barking at the trooper, according to the court’s opinion. He told her to control them, then opened fire, killing both.Under a 2016 state law, police body camera video in North Carolina is closed to the public by default. The panel found the trial judge acted within his discretion, noting that Ms. Nikac can ask for the footage’s release again later and is free to speak publicly about what it shows.In Colorado, a fight over another dog ended very differently.A firewood delivery couple pulled into an empty parking lot at Loveland, Colorado, on a June afternoon in 2019 to fix an icebox and let their three dogs stretch their legs. A call from a nearby business owner about possible trespassing brought Officer Matthew Grashorn to the scene.Minutes later, Herkimer, a 14-month-old Staffordshire bull terrier and boxer mix, bounding toward the officer with his tail wagging — had been shot twice. The dog languished in intensive care for four days before he was euthanized. No trespassing citation was issued. No charges were filed.Nearly seven years after the shooting, the City of Loveland, a northern Colorado city of roughly 80,000, has agreed to pay $675,000 to owners Wendy Love and Jay Hamm — the largest settlement of its kind in Colorado history for the police killing of a pet. The money, however, may be the least consequential part of the outcome. A ruling from the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, issued during the litigation in 2025, sets binding precedent across six states: officers cannot shoot a dog without proof of imminent danger. In a country where law enforcement shoots an estimated 10,000 pet dogs per year — with almost no mechanism to track or discipline those incidents — the ruling from Denver’s federal appellate bench is drawing notice far beyond Colorado.“A right that can’t overcome qualified immunity is a right that exists only on paper,” attorney Sarah Schielke of the Life and Liberty Law Office, who represented the couple, tells the New York Sun. “Now, in these six states, an officer who guns down a friendly dog with no imminent threat can be held liable for it, and ‘I didn’t know that was unconstitutional’ is off the table.”How many dogs have to die before anything changes?What the body camera showed and what the department saidThe sequence captured on Mr. Grashorn’s body camera, critics argue, is not ambiguous. Two dogs ran toward the officer as he exited his patrol vehicle. Ms. Love and Mr. Hamm called out to one, Bubba, who turned and came back. Herkimer did not respond and kept running toward Mr. Grashorn. The officer fired two shots. Herkimer was struck, paralyzed, and later euthanized.The body camera captured no audio at the moment of the shooting, and according to Ms. Schielke, neither Ms. Love nor Mr. Hamm ever heard the dog bark or growl.Mr. Grashorn ordered the couple back to their truck and refused to let them near Herkimer. Asked why he had fired, Mr. Grashorn said he had “no way of knowing” whether Herkimer was friendly and that he “wasn’t in the business to get bit,” according to the lawsuit. Mr. Hamm was ticketed for owning a dangerous dog. The district attorney later dismissed that charge.An internal review by the Loveland Police Department concluded the shooting was justified. The city’s statement on the settlement maintained the dog “charged the officer” and declined to accept or deny wrongdoing. The settlement requires all active Loveland officers to undergo canine interaction and de-escalation training every three years — a shift in a state where the law otherwise mandates such training only once, before hiring. “One-time training for a situation officers face every single day isn’t training, it’s just checking a box,” Ms. Schielke tells the Sun. “When a single avoidable dog shooting costs a city $675,000, recurring training stops looking expensive and starts looking like the cheapest insurance a department can buy.”The Legal Fight that Changed the MapMs. Love and Mr. Hamm went to court in 2021 over one thing: a dead dog and the officer who shot him. Their lawyers argued it as a Fourth Amendment violation, an unreasonable seizure, in legal terms. Mr. Grashorn’s defense rested on qualified immunity, which in plain English means: an officer can’t be sued personally if the law wasn’t settled enough to put him on notice.The federal judge hearing the case didn’t see it that way. Looking at the same footage everyone else had seen, he concluded a jury could find the officer was in no real danger when he fired. Mr. Grashorn pushed it up to the 10th Circuit. In 2025, the appeals court didn’t budge.That appellate decision is what separates this case from the dozens of similar ones that have faded from memory. The 10th Circuit covers Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, Kansas, Oklahoma, and New Mexico. Its ruling now constitutes clearly established law across all six states: shooting a dog in the absence of imminent danger is a constitutional violation for which officers can be held personally liable.Senior staff attorney Kathleen Wood of the Animal Legal Defense Fund tells the Sun the ruling fits a trend courts across the country are increasingly recognizing.“Five of the other 12 federal circuits throughout the United States have made similar rulings and have recognized a clearly established constitutional violation when the pet poses no immediate danger,” Ms. Wood says. “Although not directly binding on other circuits, these opinions together make powerful persuasive authority that will likely influence the remaining seven circuits that have yet to rule on this issue.”That influence is already playing out unevenly. In New Orleans, a jury reached the opposite result in a strikingly similar case — a 16-week-old puppy named Apollo, shot by an officer as he ran up wagging his tail. The jury found the officer had violated the Constitution, then shielded him with qualified immunity anyway. On July 14, the Fifth Circuit, which covers Louisiana, Texas, and Mississippi, affirmed that outcome, while separately ordering a new trial on whether the city itself had failed to train the officer. A favorable ruling on the underlying right, in other words, does not guarantee accountability. Legal fellow Mike Fox at the Cato Institute, a former Colorado public defender, tells the Sun that the court got this one right, but stresses the ruling only goes so far.“What leaves pet owners vulnerable is qualified immunity,” Mr. Fox tells the Sun. “Where there’s a genuine dispute of fact regarding whether an officer used excessive force, the framers tasked jurors — not judges — to make that call.”A professor and research scholar of animal law and policy, Justin Marceau at the University of Denver, points out that the ruling carries significance beyond its immediate geography.“The Tenth Circuit’s decision is very important for animals,” Mr. Marceau tells the Sun. “It brings the Tenth Circuit into step with the law of many other appellate courts across the country, recognizing that as a matter of law, animals are not merely property.”A National Problem with No National CountThe Loveland case did not happen in a vacuum. The Department of Justice has estimated that American police officers shoot roughly 25 to 30 dogs every single day — figures that translate to somewhere around 10,000 per year. However, the actual count could be higher. No federal law requires law enforcement agencies to track or report officer-involved animal shootings. There is no national database. The data that does exist is patchy and self-reported.“You can’t manage what you don’t measure,” Professor of Law Joanna Schwartz of UCLA School of Law tells the Sun. “Lack of data is always an impediment to accountability efforts.”Ms. Schielke goes on to highlight that “departments don’t track these shootings because tracking creates accountability, and accountability creates liability.”“As long as every one of these killings gets filed away as an isolated incident — no database, no pattern, no number — each department gets to pretend it has a one-time problem instead of a national epidemic,” she continues.Mr. Marceau puts the scale in even starker relief.“If 10,000 dogs are shot per year, that is about 27 dogs shot every day, or more than one every single hour,” he explains. “When it comes to harming animals by private persons, we have built national systems to track animal cruelty, however imperfectly, while police shootings of dogs are largely invisible.”Only five states — California, Colorado, Illinois, Tennessee, and Texas — have laws mandating any dog-encounter training for law enforcement. The consequences of that gap extend beyond pets. In one documented case out of Arlington, Texas, a rookie officer asked to check on a woman lying on a grassy area drew his weapon on an approaching dog, its tail wagging, and accidentally shot and killed the 30-year-old woman.The Loveland settlement arrived just days before another high-profile incident lit up social media. On June 13, Los Angeles police responding to a 911 call about a screaming woman, who was celebrating the Knicks’ NBA championship win, shot and killed Jameson, a 2-year-old golden Saint Bernard doodle, in front of his owner, Marie Marseille.Mayor Karen Bass called for a “thorough and transparent” investigation. Ms. Marseille has since sued the city and the department, alleging excessive force and unconstitutional municipal customs, practices and policies. Mr. Fox says the problem is painfully familiar. “Cops kill dogs for sport, and it’s largely because there’s no meaningful way to hold them accountable,” he says.But defenders of law enforcement point out that officers often face split-second decisions in unpredictable encounters, with no reliable way to assess a dog’s intent in the moment. Supporters of the current approach note that some departments have voluntarily adopted training programs developed with the Department of Justice. Where training is required by law, the results can be dramatic: The Animal Legal Defense Fund says dog shootings in Texas fell by more than 90 percent after the state mandated the training in 2015. “If the officer has not been provided training and equipment to subdue a dog non-lethally, it is more likely that courts will consider a dog shooting to be a reasonable response,” Ms. Wood says. Consistently equipping officers and training them in animal behavior will help ensure accountability when officers act contrary to that training and needlessly kill beloved companion animals.”Still, Professor emeritus David Favre of Michigan State University College of Law, a longtime scholar of animal law, tells the Sun that local governments rarely absorb lessons from cases outside their own jurisdictions.“Local government does not seem to take notice of anything out of their state,” Mr. Favre tells the Sun. “Training costs money and time, so usually it only happens after a local killing.”For Ms. Love and Mr. Hamm, the fight, they say, was never about the money.“Protecting other dogs has always been our primary goal,” Ms. Love said in a statement. “Herkimer’s senseless death ripped a hole in our hearts and lives that no other family should ever have to endure.”Five years of litigation, a landmark federal ruling, and $675,000 later, the law has shifted, at least in six states. Whether the rest of the country follows may depend on how many more Herkimers it takes.Ms. Schielke stresses that the four vulnerabilities in the law — the reach of qualified immunity; a subjective imminent-danger standard; treating dogs as replaceable property; and the absence of any national training mandate — won’t close on their own.“Until those things change, the hard truth is that your dog’s protection depends entirely on which side of a state line you’re standing on,” she says. “Our hope is that the big settlement number and the published case law that came out of the horrific tragedy of Herkimer’s senseless killing can begin to fix those problems.”

Police Shoot 10,000 Dogs a Year; Whether Anyone is Held Accountable Depends on the State

Police Shoot 10,000 Dogs a Year; Whether Anyone is Held Accountable Depends on the State

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