A Mesa Officer Shot a Dog. The Bullet Passed Through and Struck a Fellow Officer.

The call was a noise complaint. It came on April 1, 2018, at an apartment in Mesa, Arizona, and by the time the encounter was over, a dog was dying and a police officer had been shot by a colleague's bullet.

The noise complaint turned into a struggle with an intoxicated man. In the middle of it, the man's pit bull bit one of the officers. A stun gun failed. Then the officer shot the dog — and the bullet did not stop there. It passed through the dog's neck and struck the second officer in the groin.

The dog later died of the wound. The injured officer survived.

The facts here are less contested than in most of these cases: the dog bit an officer, and a less-lethal option was tried before the gun came out. Take all of that as given. What remains is what the bullet did. Fired at a dog in quarters close enough that the same round wounded a fellow officer beyond it, the shot demonstrated the physics that runs through this entire archive: a bullet aimed at a dog does not confine itself to the dog. In this case, the collateral damage wore a badge.

Mesa released the body-camera footage in September 2018, more than five months after the shooting. What the department did not release, then or afterward so far as the record shows, is any further accounting. The officer who fired was not publicly named. No discipline was reported — not for the shot that killed the dog, and not for the same shot that struck a fellow officer.

Consider what that silence covers. A firearm was discharged during a close-quarters struggle at an apartment, and the round wounded a police officer. If that sequence triggered a use-of-force review, a policy change, retraining, or any institutional reflection at all, none of it was ever made public. There is no national standard governing when police may shoot an animal and no requirement to report it when they do. Mesa was under no obligation to say more, and it did not.

The dog — whose name, like the officer's, was never reported — died of the gunshot. The wounded officer survived. The footage surfaced five months later. And the aftermath, in its entirety as publicly reported: no discipline for anyone. Even a police bullet that struck a police officer purchased no reported consequence.