He Reported Growling Dogs. The Video Showed a Wagging Tail. Minneapolis Paid $150,000.

The burglary alarm was false. That is the first fact of July 8, 2017, in Minneapolis: no break-in, no burglar, nothing to interrupt. Officer Michael Mays of the Minneapolis Police Department responded to the alarm anyway — that is the job — and entered the family's fenced backyard.

Ciroc and Rocko lived there: two pit bulls who were the family's service and support dogs. When the two dogs approached the officer who had come into their yard, Mays fired on both of them.

Both dogs survived their wounds. So did the evidence, because a surveillance camera was recording. Without that camera, the only account of the encounter would have been the one Mays wrote.

Mays's report said the dogs were growling. The surveillance video showed one of the dogs approaching him with its tail wagging. That is not a fine dispute over an ambiguous instant; it is a written account of menace, contradicted by the family's own camera.

The family sued, and their case accomplished what most dog-shooting lawsuits never do. Qualified immunity — the judge-made doctrine that shields officers from civil liability unless their conduct violated clearly established law — ends many of these cases before any jury weighs the evidence. Here, the United States Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit reviewed the case and denied Michael Mays qualified immunity. The shield came off.

The Minneapolis City Council then approved a $150,000 settlement to the family whose service dogs had been shot in their own fenced yard over an alarm that meant nothing.

Now the rest of the ledger. No criminal charges were ever brought against Mays. The record reports no departmental discipline of any kind. And the $150,000 was not paid by the officer whose written report the video contradicted; it was paid by the City of Minneapolis, which is to say by its taxpayers. Ciroc and Rocko recovered. The family was compensated. Officer Michael Mays, whose account of growling dogs met a video of a wagging tail in federal court, bore no reported personal consequence at all. The city paid for what the camera saw. He did not.