Danuta Malysz has lived in her west Detroit neighborhood since 1968. On December 1, 2015, Detroit police officers arrived at a house there to execute a narcotics search warrant.

What the officers took away, according to the department's "destruction of animal" report obtained by Reason through a records request, was a large bag of marijuana, a shotgun and four empty pill bottles. The report also records that officers shot three "vicious, charging" pit bulls, killing one and wounding the other two.

What the report does not mention, Reason wrote, is that Malysz — described by the magazine as an elderly woman — was inside the house when officers began breaking down the door.

"He was aiming the gun at the dogs, and I started screaming, 'Please don't shoot my dogs, please don't shoot my dogs!'" Malysz said in an interview with the World Animal Awareness Society a day after the raid, quoted by Reason. "He said, 'How many dogs do you have?' I said four, and one is the neighbor's. And then he started shooting."

Malysz said police removed her from the house after the first dog was shot. When the officers left and she was allowed back in, according to her account, she found her three dogs shot and bleeding. She could not walk through the kitchen, she said, because the "floor was bloody, completely covered in blood." Reason reported that one of the dogs had been struck in the hindquarters — an unusual angle, the magazine noted, for a bullet to hit an animal charging at an officer. Malysz said that as the officers left, one of them told her, "Don't blame us, blame your grandson."

Only one news organisation has reported this raid. No independent account of it was located, and the officers' names and badge numbers were redacted in the reports released to Reason, so no officer is named here. Every contested detail above rests on that single outlet and on the people it quotes.

The record

No lawsuit over this raid has been reported. No discipline has been reported. No departmental finding specific to this shooting has been made public.

What is documented is the system that absorbed it. Reason reported that supervisors reviewing the destruction-of-animal reports found officers acted within department guidelines in every single one of the 40 reports the magazine examined. Department directives permit an officer to shoot an animal posing an imminent threat; in nearly every report in which an officer killed a dog, Reason found, the animal was described as vicious and charging. Detroit police killed at least 25 dogs in 2015, the year of this raid, and shot at least 21 more in the first eight months of 2016 — and Reason found that reports from at least seven incidents documented in lawsuits and news coverage were missing entirely from the records the city produced.

The department declined to comment on pending litigation for that investigation. It also refused to say what training it offers or what policies govern officer encounters with dogs, telling the reporter to file a public-records request — after the department had already deemed its manual of directives exempt from disclosure. There is no federal requirement that any of it be reported at all.