A Chicago Officer Fired at a Dog. The Fragments Put Two Officers in the Hospital.

Nearly everything the public knows about the dog who died in Chicago's McKinley Park neighborhood on May 15, 2017, comes from the people who shot it. The Chicago Police Department described the dog as vicious, as aggressive. Its name, if it had one, was never reported. Its breed was never reported. Whether it belonged to anyone was never reported. In the official record, this dog exists only as the threat an officer perceived.

What is not in dispute is what the bullet did. Officers patrolling McKinley Park encountered the dog; one officer fired at it and killed it. The round then ricocheted or fragmented — the accounts allow for either — and struck two nearby officers, one in the leg and one in the foot. Both went to the hospital. Their injuries were described as non-life-threatening.

The officer who fired was never publicly named. The dog was never named at all. The only characterization either received in public was the department's: the dog was aggressive, and the shooting, implicitly, was what aggression required.

It is worth sitting with the sequence, because dog shootings are almost always defended in the language of safety: the animal was a danger, and the gun removed the danger. Here, the gun was the danger. A single officer's decision to fire at a dog in a Chicago neighborhood put two police officers in the hospital. The fragments that found one officer's leg and another's foot were not aimed at anyone — that is what bullet fragments are, force that goes where physics sends it rather than where judgment does. In a city neighborhood, fragments do not distinguish between an officer's boot and whoever else happens to be standing near.

If wounding two of its own prompted the Chicago Police Department to reconsider when officers should fire at dogs, no such reckoning appears in the record. What the record shows instead is the department's tally for the day: one dog dead, described by the department that killed it as vicious; two officers wounded by the round meant for the dog; and, for the officer who fired it, no discipline reported. Two police officers went to the hospital because a colleague shot at a dog — and even that was not enough to produce a documented consequence.