Shocking Ruling on Police Dog Bite Case

Hello, I'm back again with another show. Before we get to the show, as usual, let me thank a couple of sponsors real quick. Bob Eden with Katz Canine Software. Katz was the first one out of the box doing record keeping online. Bob keeps updating the system all the time. So check out katzplatinum.com. It's a real customizable canine record keeping system.

I really recommend it. So if you check out the website, if you're not using it yet, Bob will hook you up with a trial run so you can customize it and run some reports and just see the quality of software that it is. It's great software if you have to generate a report either for court or just for your admin or something to show what you're doing. One touch of a button and you'll print out a really nice report showing how

valuable the whole canine team is for the agency. So check out catsplatinum.com for all your record-keeping software needs. Also, I want to thank Kevin Sheldahl. He owns Canine Services down in New Mexico. And Kevin does a lot of different training. He supplies dogs. He'll do canine audits. You can do a full academy down there in New Mexico with him. He'll come to you and do seminars. So he'll do just about anything to do with police dogs Kevin can help you with.

Give Kevin a call at 505-250-4576 or check out his website at canineservices.com, and it's k-9services.com. Music.

This is the Police Canine Training Podcast with Jeff Meyer. Join us for each episode to get real-world advice from canine professionals who have experience on the street. Each episode will focus on up-to-date information that you can use on the street. Spend about 30 minutes with us each week as part of your training day. Our goal at Police Canine Training is to make every canine team be the best they can be. Music.

Welcome to the police canine training podcast i'm your host jeff meyer today i'm excited i have scott sargent here from uh he's retired lapd captain and if you listened to my old podcast i had him on it's been a been a minute since i had him on there but scott runs a company called policing solutions has decades of law enforcement experience going all the way up through through the ranks and has done a lot of stuff so he gets to you know you can talk about you know what it's like to be a cop,

you know, answering calls and then all the way going up through into a command structure and travels a lot, does a lot of training of use of force and is very well versed in all that, has a lot of other degrees and stuff. So I'm going to let Scott kind of introduce himself and then we're going to talk about a very important case that just came out of California in the last couple of months that I want to make sure everybody's real well versed on. So how are you doing today, Scott?

Good. Thanks, Jeff. Good. Thanks for having me. I appreciate you taking the time. And since most of my listeners from my old show came over to this show, but just in case they don't remember, whatever, can you kind of go over your background just to remind everybody who you are and how you ended up here on this show tonight? Sure. I'm a 35-year veteran of law enforcement. I was a cop in Florida and I've been working for several departments out here.

I spent the last 22 and a half or so with LAPD where I retired as a captain. I was a command officer in Newton Division, 77th Division, and spent about seven and a half years with the Use of Force Review Division, where we reviewed all categorical and non-categorical, which is like level one, two, three uses of force. I'm an attorney, and I don't really do much practicing, but I've stayed very much involved with K-9. I was a K-9 handler out in San Bernardino County in the 80s.

And so I'm very much in tune, I think, to where we have been as a canine community and where we kind of need to be. So that's kind of what I bring now to my company and to you guys, to the podcast.

And with your company, I know you do a lot of different stuff, but kind of talk about a little bit what kind of services do you offer through Policing Solutions? Solutions? Here, so basically we take a look at what organizations are doing. So they reach out and say, hey, our canine unit has had a couple of lawsuits, three or four lawsuits, and we'd like to get some feedback.

We'll go in and do a comprehensive review of the department and come up with a report, which has usually 20 to 30 recommendations, some of them minor, some of them more significant, including looking at the organizational chart, who's in charge of who, who does the training, and the rank file structure for the unit, who's in charge of the pergony bytes, and what's your use of force protocol for canine bytes and all that. And then we make those recommendations.

And then we go to training, we show up, we interview handlers, and we do a fairly comprehensive report kind of laying out what our thoughts are for recommendations for trainees to avoid problems in the future. And it can be a very helpful thing. We do the same thing with force. I'll help agencies with developing use of force protocols and review processes where, well, we've had three shootings and we don't have any system to handle it. So what do we do?

And I'll go in and say, okay, this is the best practice for taking a critical incident and reviewing it all the way up through its final review and approval by administrators. So that's kind of some of the stuff we do. And that's, it's a good time to kind of explain that, you know, before we get into this case. If you're a handler and you're listening to this, a lot of people, you know, at first, because, you know, nobody really looks at maybe a review of your agency in a positive light.

But most of the time when I travel around and I talk to handlers and, you know, you have a beer at night or something after a training, most people, most of the handlers that, you know, pay great of a handler have some pretty good solid suggestions as to maybe how the whole unit could run better. And if, you know, if they could sit down and talk to the chief and change things, you know, maybe they'd have a voice, but most, most places don't really have that kind of open line of communication.

So, if you're a handler and there's a way you could suggest having, whether it's Scott's company and maybe something even less formal of just having an agency next door, if you have a bigger agency that has a huge program, maybe get one of their officers or command officers to come over and take a look.

But having anybody come in, do a review of your agency, you know, from the canine perspective, from, you know, the canine handler all the way up through the chain is actually a real positive thing. And I've done it several times for different agencies. And most of the recommendations that I've made when I've done it have been pretty favorable to the handlers to make their life better and make things kind of work a little bit better for them. And I assume that's often your experience too.

Yes, very much. And actually to that point, there's one primary thing that we see in a lot of agencies, which is they don't really have any process for internal review or to do the change. They just keep chugging along and doing the same thing. And when something comes up that might be of issue, they don't really address it. Or they say, well, someone can handle it in training. So one of the main things we say is, look, you've got to debrief everything.

And when change is needed, even if it's incremental, you recognize it, you embrace it, which is like the case we're going to talk about. And you make those changes and you reinforce those changes. But, yeah, I agree with that. External, sometimes coming from the outside, that objective oversight, that objective review, it takes putting aside your ego, which is a big part of policing.

Saying, you know, even for executives is they don't want no one coming in and telling them what to do, but there's nothing wrong with getting a little feedback from, from an outside source, an objective source, and then taking it into consideration when you're developing policies and all. Absolutely. And, and for the, for canine units, I think one of the things is that I always try to stress to canine units that something bad might happen in your agency completely away from canine.

Something, maybe a shooting, you know, that the public doesn't support for whatever reason or something that is not dog related at all that causes, you know, people coming in to look at, you know, either the Department of Justice or somebody coming in to investigate your agency. And canines low hanging fruit when they start doing those types of investigations.

Investigations, and they're going to make recommendations because we're a high-profile type of use of force that people, activists who don't like cops, we're right in that bullseye area where they really want to target. So you might be squared away, but maybe something happens to your agency and now you're under investigation.

It should be a lot nicer that when they start poking around, you could say, hey, just 18 months ago, we had a professional organization come in, write this policy or write this report. From that, we changed our policy and they know more about it than you guys do. So move on. And I think being a little proactive in some of that could really pay off for some agencies sometimes. I think that's a great point. I work with the Department of Justice on a couple of consent decrees.

I'm a consultant on one, and I'm a member of the monitoring team on another large city back east. And I can actually, you know, I agree with what you're saying, that Department of Justice has kind of not paid that much attention to K-9 in the past. They've always kind of had the attitude, you know, your agency should have an effective policy in place and pay attention to best practices.

But now, I think things are going to start to change a little bit. And where they would look for past practice and patterns and practices and agencies related to force, I get the feeling that those are going to start to include canine-related incidents. And the reason, part of the reason is that handlers didn't really use body cams that much until the fairly recent past.

And now that they're out there and they're, you know, all the rage, pulling people out of a motorist out of a car on a traffic stop is no longer quite as exciting as watching that dog bite behind the dumpster at 3 a.m. So it's going to get more attention. I agree with that. Yeah. And it's just, it's a world we live in.

And, you know, so hopefully, you know, all this information, you know, settles into some people and they think, you know, what, and getting better is, it should be our, our goal all the time.

And that, that includes having to change policies sometimes and, and change tactics, which is kind of, you know, what the theme of what we're going to talk about. And, you know, I know you and I are on the same page and people who listen to my podcast probably are tired of hearing me talk about, you know, the advantages of using a verbal, verbal or recall when you're on a live bite.

But we have a case now that came out that we're going to talk about that is just one more example from the court saying take a look at your training your policies and how you're deploying and. Here's a pretty good example of it so i'll let you kind of explain the case, okay this is the case let's see it's rosenthal versus city of san jose which was an incident that occurred and i'm kind of dating through it that goes bouncing all over the place september 10, 2019.

It was an incident where San Jose police responded to a domestic violence call. There was an officer, and I won't use names. I'm not going to go into details about specifics, but just general for your audience. But the case is there. It's available. You can look at it. You can look at the details.

Also, I'll reference the actual oral arguments, which I have a copy of, which if people want to listen to, it's interesting to hear how the city, how both, defendant and plaintiff counsel, they go back and forth and they talk about things and then you listen to the.

Comments by the by the justices and you can kind of get a feel for where their minds are at as they're going through and talking about the case anyway they go into a call as an individual you can you can look at the video the actual body cam video it's it's a very how do i put this it's a very basic bite yeah it's just nothing else this is the problem with this this case this This is what's frightening about the case. There's nothing inordinate about it. There are no five-minute bites.

There are no excessive force allegations on top of the bite. None of that. It's a very basic bite. They want this guy in custody. He's, I believe he's got a felony warrant. I can't remember. I think he had a felony warrant. Yeah. Yeah, so they tell him to come down. He won't come down. He's at the top of the stairs.

Police are at the bottom of the stairs. uh in order to not let this guy leave or go into other rooms and you know lock himself away or arm himself they they at what is reasonable what is a reasonable time even according to the court they deploy the dog for the for the uh to to make the the bite yeah okay the dog rates the bite they go up after after a total of 20 seconds that's the time on bite but there's actually a longer amount amount of time for officers to get up on top of

the stairway the individual has his hands out i'm kind of generalizing the facts here has his hands out okay they they they then do what most handlers do which is they get around the guy this they tactically deploy in the arrest team and they take the guy start to take him into custody take the dog off and they handcuff him and they They secure the scene and they move on. Really nothing unique about this. Exactly. Despite. And the damage to the suspect isn't really extreme at all.

The damage, well, the damage is arguably fairly significant. You look at the videos. Yeah. I mean, the photos and stuff. But, you know, that is what occurs depending on what dog you have. I mean, things happen. And so, yeah, that is something to keep in mind is that if courts can, juries can measure, mentally can, you've got to think of this in a few different ways.

When the case is being presented, you literally have to think of this as you're preparing your reports and dealing with training and all this. The more severe the bite is, the juries will kind of infer, you know, wow, that was a lot of force when it could have been a four second bite. And you said I had, for example, in the 80s, a bite where the dog severed a brachial artery. He flatlined and almost didn't make it. But the bite was all of five seconds. Yeah, yeah.

But this bite lasted longer and there was some more visible damage. Yeah. But, you know, there's only so much you can do about that. Yeah, I mean, it's as close to a, if there is such a thing, it's as close to a run-of-the-mill dog bite and a police apprehension.

You know it from you know i've saw i saw the video too and yeah it it's really it's something that happens in this country quite often it's very run-of-the-mill i think that's a great great way to look at it it's we we've all seen a lot of bites and this one was not one that i would ever expect to end up in the uh the ninth circuit yeah so it ends up in a in a in a trial, a 1983 case, and in the middle of the trial, there's an interlocutory motion.

To, which is, let me make sure I have the legal dynamics. I'm really prepared to talk about the tactics involved in the case. So the defendants appealed from the denial of the motion for summary judgment, which basically denies qualified immunity for the officers.

The case is heard in the Ninth Circuit. Let's back up real quick there. So, I mean, basically what the cops are saying is, hey, we have qualified immunity. We follow policy. Drop our names out of this case. You can sue the city, but leave us out of it. Is that kind of what they were doing? Right. Qualified immunity basically states that even if it did occur, we're essentially acting within course and scope of our duty.

There's no facts to support court you know denying our immunity in this case we're doing our job and so even if the facts are, as you argue them to be we're we're just doing what we're paid to do that's essentially what what what and and these happen quite a lot but this one got traction for some for some reason so most of the time the courts would say yeah we're gonna you're right you have qualified immunity and we'll get you out of the case and not here in colorado

they've changed that but But they probably thought routine bite, routine court hearing will get you guys dropped out and then kind of work through the rest of the case. I would imagine it's probably what all the attorneys for the officers probably thought so at that point. Right. So if you have essentially what it comes down to in the case is that there is an if there is a clearly established law that the officers violated and officers should have should have known the law.

I can read it to you. I got to find it, but then there's going to be an issue of denial of qualified immunity. So, in this case, they found that the officers did, that they upheld the denial of qualified immunity for these cops, which to me is absolutely horrifying. Yes. Because this is a basic bite. The facts are not that significant, but the facts that are left up, it's going to be kicked back to the trial court for the jury to make findings on the outcome of the actual case.

But now you have cops going to trial with a denial of their qualified immunity, and that is a frightening thing. Yeah. So this is something that we really need to talk about.

Yeah. So the case isn't over. it's just the cops did not get dismissed which like you say that it's a frightening thing because if if they're if they're following policy they're doing with you know whatever he's always done nothing's different here they didn't stomp this guy they did nothing then there's no accusations of any of that there's no evidence of any of that it would be one where normally they would they would be released from the case and the guy could keep suing the

agency for whatever The fact that they're still on there is what you and I have talked about that I hope every listening realizes how frightening that is because when the wording is that the cops should understand the law and the law of the land and all that, I think they did. I think they followed it and not only did the court but also the appeals court and the Ninth Circuit both ruled against the cops and that's a shot across the bow to all of us.

Saying, you know, your qualified immunity is only so good as what the courts are going to allow. And this is a very important case. Right. So the two prongs of it, just to kind of keep in mind, are that the conduct by the officers violated a constitutional right that was clearly established at the time of the officers' misconduct. They're quoting misconduct.

Yeah. So essentially, the question is, what was that right and what established that law? What is it we're talking about? How would cops know that this bite violated a defendant's constitutional rights? And we refer back to a case, the primary case that was discussed during the arguments, that's Watkins. Watkins versus—it's an Oakland case. And Watkins was a case. There were a handful of cases that were discussed, but basically the rule – and this is actually one of the justices.

Justice Forster made a comment, and she kind of did for clarification during our argument. She said, okay, so the rule is – and I'm paraphrasing –. When the dog is biting and the suspect has surrendered and is not a danger, the dog has to be taken off. And then there's like a period. Yeah. And then they continue on. She like articulates the rule that the officers should have known. So that's kind of what we're talking about. Yeah.

So the rule in Watkins was that an officer clearly violates established law by allowing a police dog to continue biting a suspect after the suspect's surrender. Even when the suspect is not handcuffed.

So does that conflict with what you're doing in the field regardless of how you deploy the dog regardless of whether you do campaign compliance by regardless of whether you do a call a verbal call off you do a tactical hands-on call off physical removal be aware to be aware of the rule that's being applied by the court now let me pause for a second and say that this rule is a a ninth circuit this is a ninth circuit decision however when other other courts don't have

anything to look on look to in their own jurisdictions or closer so the whatever you know jurisdictions uh district back back east let's say because yeah i know that there's people listening they're like well i'm in wyoming that doesn't count here oh well wait a minute if you have a case where the facts are are very specific to your incident they can then in bring in the facts and the decision and the opinion of the court

in that case if there's nothing they've never had it they're going to look around the country for other cases that have occurred at the federal level and see what those decisions are for that to inform their decision in your jurisdiction.

And they don't have to, but they can do it. Any court can do what they want, but they can certainly look to this decision in the Ninth Circuit and they can say, well, this apparently was the rule in this federal district and we don't have one in ours that speaks directly to it, or we have one that's close to it.

And there are some across the country that are not completely distinct from this that support it. They might rely on Watkins. They might rely on this ruling and it's like, well, this is what we have to go on. Then the question is, what are you training your cops? You know, does anyone know this? So the question, and I'm kind of rambling on, but this is clearly established law. So is that part of your training?

Do you realize that by allowing a police dog to continue biting a suspect after the suspect is, inserting the word objectively, surrendering, even when not handcuffed, that can be considered a direct violation, a constitutional violation.

With that consideration there should be a lot of discussion about what goes on in your training and your policies and where you go from yeah so let's take that wording and then kind of circle back to to the the san jose case so they've sent the dog up the stairs the dog's on a bite i believe he's on his uh forearm i think i think it was if i remember it yes i think so and the the cops basically, they don't waste any time.

They go straight up, start putting the guy into cuffs, and then take the dog off him. That's where the clock started is kind of how I understand it, that they started saying that he had signaled, okay, I give up. And by the time the cops walked up the stairs, put a little additional control on the suspect, and then the handler took the dog off without having an issue. There's nothing that I've read or seen that he had any trouble taking the dog off.

And the courts still, that's why we're saying it's kind of a run-of-the-mill one if you haven't seen the video, the courts still said that under this rule of law that they should have taken him off the second he signaled he was submitting to arrest. Is that kind of how, Am I paraphrasing that correctly? Yeah, that is exactly it. So I'll tell you where this could be problematic is during, and I'm only now going to go into...

Recommendation mode on things to keep in mind um so when you're when you're deploying the dogs, it you want to think about things that involve campaign compliance bites my opinion is that pain compliance bites are problematic unless you can fully support them and anything you do should be able to fully support in your report as far as what you're doing you don't just say yeah we used the dog and then we got him under control he surrendered we arrested

him pain compliance bites are problematic when you just jump out of the car what i'm talking about is jump out of of the car there's four officers on him no real the guy's not out of control but he's they're having trouble handcuffing him but there's four cops or five cops or whatever and you have this fairly standard protocol of just inserting the dog into the into the problem by onto the leg or the arm or something that's still done fairly frequently

yes that can be considered problematic and also again something else we talk about in in our reviews is is the de-escalation proportionality is this bite going to de-escalate or escalate you know the resistance and so you want to keep that in mind yeah the other thing is duration the duration of the bite. It has never really been an issue before. It's been a very, you know, the way handlers document their bites or we use the bite and use the dog.

The dog, there was compliance. We took him into custody. He raised his hands and then we moved forward and took him into custody. My opinion, you should be able to fully articulate in your report the duration of the bite.

Body cam will tell you how long and why you have the dog on for 40 seconds or for 30 seconds if it's a five second bite and you know you have an e-collar and he came right off you're you're always going to be within yeah in a good place but the duration is something that no one seems to be really talking about in their police reports i've read a lot of police reports and they don't talk about how long the dog was on and then

you look and there's a you know significant damage or he's hospitalized or something and um you look at the you actually go back and then look at the cams and they're they're you know the dog was on for i saw one case where the dog was on for three minutes yeah yeah and the guy was screaming with his hands up the whole time it was not fun to watch yeah yeah and then reasonableness of the actual deployment and the actual you know of all

of it so the duration is was it reasonable for you to do that all that if i can just touch on recall call please if you don't if agencies don't use an e-caller or yeah an e-caller i would think you might want to think about it because if you're automatically deferring to a hard out where look we don't care we're mildly interested in watkins or any of this stuff in the ninth circuit we send the dog the dog deploys hits the guy when we then move up when we're ready we.

Will take the guy into in custody. We don't care if his hands are up or down or whatever. Yeah. That could be problematic because that is exactly what this case essentially is. And this is only a 22nd bite. So the majority of cases I've looked at where you're just using a simple hard out, we're going to get tactical, we're going to assume tactical control, we're going to move forward, arrest team, then I will secure the dog.

Then you will put your hands behind your back. Then I will remove the dog. And it can go on for, you know, however long, but you may want to consider the option of being able to recall the dog off the bike. Right. If he's the rent, if he's got his dog goes by in the dumpster, he screams, OK, OK, OK. You move around. You now see his hands. He's sitting there with his hands up. What's the what's the harm in calling the dog off and then moving forward?

You know, you contain it, whatever, move up and then have the guy come out and arrest him.

What's the harm in in, you know, moving forward or trying to initiate a verbal recall protocol?

Call and that probably means an e-caller for a lot of agencies because if your dog hasn't done this it's not going to start doing it yeah it training though you can you can train it yeah you could train it and if uh if you have an e-caller it is a safety thing so and i know you you preach this i preach this you know i know mike usby preaches it but but still the minority and i know people that are listening are shaking their head and you know i'm tired of hearing jeff

meyer talk about verbal recalls, but, but I'm hoping it isn't the minority for, for as long because. You know, the courts are telling us that this is important. And when you're traveling around the country, what do you think, you know, like my, I would say 75% of the people I talk to are still very much dog stays on the bite until I handcuff them. Is that okay? Yeah, that's absolutely, absolutely the case. And I completely

understand, understand it. Yeah. And I understand too, but I just, I'm hoping that some of these things start jogging, you know, a little bit of thought into maybe we, we don't have to have that as our policy all the time. And we're going to explore options when the person is clearly submitted to arrest and, you know, they've got their hands up, dog's biting them in the leg or something.

I'm saying they're out in the middle of the street and they're saying, I surrender, I surrender, whatever they're saying, that might be a time that you can just get the dog back to you. It's possible to train it. People tell me that, you know, it's not possible. It's proven it's possible. Then tactically, it's better in a lot of ways. And then unfortunately, the world we live in, all this is now on body camera.

And you and I talked a minute before we did this show. You know, I, I hate the idea that we have to change our tactics and our policing and everything because of body cameras, but they're putting cops in jail over videos that of doing things that the cop would have done. Probably not had any issue on until it was actually seen on the body camera. And, you know, it's a world we live in and start thinking those things through. Which one do you want to sit in court of?

The person who is submitting to arrest and the dog's still on the bite or the person who's dismissed to arrest and then you're 15, 20 feet away and you call the dog back, leash him up, and let somebody else put cuffs on him. To me, I know where I want to be. Yeah, I agree with that. There's a couple of videos on my website that, now, the videos are LAPD, and a lot of people are like, wow, LAPD, this and that.

But LAPD doesn't get indicted because they're pretty much way ahead of trying to stay beyond the reach of these cases because they know the direction. So when Watkins came out, it was like, well, we're training to the case law, and this is the case law. You do it on search and seizure and narcotics, so why not do it with canines?

So the videos are are pretty quick but they're to the unit sends the dog out and the dog but you know there's a guy fleeing for one yard and the other arrests him the bite is one one thousand two and stand still put your hands up don't move i said put your hands up okay okay okay here come dog comes back it's on an e-collar and they go up and the guy's sitting there with his hands up and he starts i didn't do anything you know and then they handcuff him but it is e-collar training.

So it is different yeah it for some i mean and i do a lot of e-collar training so some dogs can do it with or without but it's it's training that's possible that's for sure when when i talk to people about this i get two objections and i assume they're the same two you get so the first objection i usually get is what if the dog re-bites the guy then i'm in more trouble what's your answer to that uh you're not because

you're following protocol and if the dog re-bites It's a training issue and you retrain the dog. You don't ignore the re-bite. You don't ignore the issue. You address it, but you doesn't mean that you don't, you know. But you tried. You tried. Yeah. You abide by your policy. And the fact that the dog re-bit is simply a training issue where, you know, that's all, that's all it is. Now, if it's your, if it's your 10th street bite and every street bite, the dog re-bites three times.

Now you have a problem. problem but but don't let that argument of a you know the dog might re-bite the guy dictate your your reasoning as to why you'll never call your dog off and that's the that's the number one way i do i hear it the second way is is if i call the dog off and the guy runs then he's going to get away or then we have to resend the dog and now there is a video out of lapd where that actually happened and i've talked to you know

handlers and trainers from lapd and i know you've done a lot of reviews of that, can you speak to what an aberration that actually is?

How many times a suspect will actually run after their dog bit? Again, there's a lot of small agencies that have limited resources. So when you're containing your search area, you like to see your search area as wide as possible, but as absolutely contained as possible. So that if the guy runs, he's not going anywhere. Maybe he does go somewhere, you're still able to track him.

So you don't let your policy be dictated by the operant rule or by the possibility that your equipment could be defective. So that's one way to look at it is if you keep getting re-bites or you keep getting, he keeps biting other officers. Okay. Why is he still working? Why is the dog still working? Yeah. Or without, you know, without training. So yeah, there's, there's ways to train, train through it instead of just saying, well, if it happens, we're not going to do anything different.

And the incident that like in your reviews and stuff, when I talked to a couple of trainers and I even talked to Mike Goosby about it, the number of times that they will do in the LA, you know, and agencies that do it in my own experience too. I had one person had a many, many, many that when I did a verbal recall off of a street bite, I had one person that tried to run. And I mean, it's, it's less than 1%, I would say. And that's kind of what the LA guys who do it a lot have told me.

So that argument also, to me, doesn't really hold water. Most of these people, once they've been bit by the dog, are now done and don't want to try it again. So the two arguments of I might get a re-bite and then the guy might get away if I don't take the dog off, the courts are not siding with you for those two arguments.

And they're kind of saying exactly the opposite. So, it seems like to me, you know, the writing's on the wall that if we keep ignoring it, the courts will get more and more forceful about their language unless we start, you know, policing ourselves a little bit. Right. I agree. And you can hear it in when the justices talk about these during these cases there, they like, I, this is an interesting case to listen to because Forrest says, well, that's the rule.

So, and then she kind of carries on and moves on. So in other words, she's just stating, I mean, you can almost hear in her voice. Well, then what is it that they don't understand if that's the rule? That's the rule. Yeah. Yeah. You've been told. You've been told. Yeah. You, you, you've been told that. So therefore you're, you're, you know, you should be aware of it.

So that's kind of a, that's the shot over the bow is that you should know that when the person surrenders, you've got to get the dog off, you know? Yeah. And it's a, it's a scary, scary case that I hope I'll put the, the title of the case and everything in there and you can do your own research, but I hope everybody takes a little bit of time, looks it over. And, you know, I hope, hope when it's all done, the San Jose cops end up okay on it.

This is not a, not a bad deployment, not a bad, I mean, I don't see, I just don't see anything bad on this deal other than the courts are kind of going against them. But it's not one of those ones that for me would be hard to defend the, even the tactics or anything. I think they did a nice job on it. Yeah, I agree. That's why I was so, when we read it, it was like, wait a minute, there's gotta be more like, no, it's 22nd bite.

Yeah. I said, Oh man, there's some bites out there that, that if they, if they got their hands on would be really problematic. Cause this is really not that big a deal, but it is guiding. It tells us what to do and what not to do, what we need to do in the future. So just wanted to get you on here and just a little food for thought. You know, we'll put the case, I'll put it on in the show notes and put your information on there in case somebody wants to reach out to you.

But I think it's good information. And after I kind of heard about it and I knew you'd put out an email about it, I thought I'd want to get this show out and get people to at least get a heads up so they know what's going on. And again, you know, even though it's California, what starts out there a lot of times tends to leak over to the rest of the country. Yeah, absolutely. Yep. Well, thanks for the time, Scott. I think this is a good information and it'll probably get you back on here.

We're going to talk some more about maybe writing policies and updating policies because I think that's always a good thing to do. And maybe, you know, every year take a look at your policies. And I'm sure when you're looking at policies, as you're doing these evaluations, there's probably some common themes or things that maybe have changed over the years and the agency's policies maybe have not caught up to it. Right. Okay. That sounds great. I agree with that. Okay. Thanks,

Scott. Okay. No problem.

All right. So that's going to wrap it up for this show. A lot of stuff to think about on a show like this. Our profession is always evolving and the courts sometimes are pushing changes that maybe we agree or don't agree with. This isn't the sky is falling type case, but it's one that you should be paying attention to and really look at how you can be out in front of some of these different trends that we're starting to see.

Speaking of trends, it's cooling down a little bit, but you still need a heat alarm. You need that heat alarm because it's monitoring your car all the time. If there's something going on with your car and it gets too hot in there for some other reason, the heat alarm is going to save your dog from potential death if it's too hot in there. So one of the things I get a lot of questions about is what heat alarm should you use, and the only heat alarm I recommend is acecanine.com.

Ace Canine has been around for a very, very long time. The quality of their product is, in my opinion, the very best heat alarm out there. So check out acecanine.com. They have the only one, to my knowledge, that still will talk to your phone through a cellular feature. So it's more advanced than the other heat alarms that are on the market, and it's a very good quality product. So check out acecanine.com. And finally, speaking of quality products, Ray Allen.

Ray Allen Canine, you can get everything you need for your dog in one stop at Ray Allen Canine. So check out rayallen.com. One of the features they have when you look on it, they have a different post. I just saw one the other day talking about bite suits and it gives you a lot of information about different styles of bite suits, why you would buy one type of bite suit over the other. So not just for product stuff, you can get on Ray Allen, you can get a lot of of education about products.

And a lot of them are about products in general, not just an infomercial for their products. But their products speak for themselves. The quality of Ray Allen canine is very, very good. So it's a good website just to kind of click through some night when you're on shift and you want to get on your computer, browse through it a little bit and read some of the articles and check out some of the videos. There's a lot of really good stuff on the website.

So thanks everybody. And I will be back next week. Music.