Millie Ran Toward a Detroit Officer in an Open Field. She Was Shot in the Face.

In May 2015, Alison Lewis, a country singer who lives in Detroit, was playing with her dog in the open field where the old Tigers Stadium used to stand. Millie, her cattle-dog mix, ran up to a Detroit police officer. The officer shot her in the face.

That account comes from Reason, which examined the shooting in a November 2016 investigation of dog shootings by the Detroit Police Department. It is the only outlet whose reporting on this incident could be located and read; Reason cites earlier coverage by the Detroit Free Press and local station WXYZ, but no independent account of the shooting was retrievable. For that reason, the officer is not named here. One newsroom is enough to record that a Detroit officer shot a dog in a public field in May 2015. It is not enough to attach a person's name to it.

The two versions of what happened in that field do not match. Police described the animal as a jumping, barking pit bull that charged the officer, according to the Free Press account summarized by Reason. Lewis rejected that description in an interview with WXYZ. "That's absolutely not true," she told the station.

Millie survived being shot in the face.

What it cost, and what it did not

According to Lewis's lawyer, Bill Goodman, the city of Detroit settled with her for $8,000, covering her veterinary bills and the time she lost from work. Reason does not report that a lawsuit was filed, and a settlement is not a finding: it is a negotiated payment that admits no liability, establishes no rule, and binds no future officer. Detroit bought the claim and moved on.

The report contains nothing about any discipline, any internal finding, or any review of the shooting. No officer is described as having faced consequences of any kind. The department, Reason reported, declined to comment on pending litigation and refused to say what training it offers or what policies govern how its officers encounter dogs; when the magazine sought the department's manual of directives through a public-records request, it was told the directives were exempt from disclosure.

The $8,000 paid for Millie was among the smaller sums. In February 2016, Reason reported, the city approved a $100,000 settlement with Darryl Lindsay after an officer shot his French mastiff, Babycakes, while she was chained to a fence outside his house.

Millie was one animal in a year the magazine documented in bulk. Using "destruction of animal" reports obtained from the department, Reason found that Detroit police killed at least 25 dogs in 2015 and shot at least 21 more in the first eight months of 2016, and that one officer was bitten by a dog across that entire period. At least seven incidents that appear in lawsuits and news coverage were missing altogether from the records the city handed over. That gap is not unique to Detroit. As Reason noted, there is no requirement anywhere that police report shooting a dog, as there is for other uses of force — which means the national figure is a guess, and the local one is whatever a department chooses to file.

Millie lived. The city paid $8,000. No discipline was reported.