His Report Said the Dogs Charged; His Camera Showed They Didn't. Detroit Paid $75,000.

Kira Horne's two pit bulls were in a hallway of a Detroit house on November 13, 2018, when officers from the Detroit Police Department's Gang Intelligence unit arrived to execute a narcotics search warrant. Officer Nathan Miller shot both dogs. Both died.

In his written report, Miller described the dogs as "charging" and "attempting to bite."

His body camera told a different story. The footage showed that neither dog was barking. Neither was growling. Neither was charging. The written account that justified two dead dogs was contradicted, point by point, by the camera the officer was wearing when he fired.

The Detroit Police Department's own investigation deemed the shooting unjustified and a policy violation — the department concluding, on the record, that its own officer's killing of Kira Horne's dogs was wrong.

Then the city paid for it. Detroit settled the resulting lawsuit for $75,000.

It is worth pausing on the mechanics, because they carry the whole case. Without the body camera, Officer Miller's written report would have stood as the official record: two charging, biting dogs, lawfully shot during the execution of a warrant. The unjustified finding, the policy-violation finding, and the $75,000 settlement all rest on one thing — footage that existed and was checked against the paperwork. The report and the video describe the same hallway, the same moment, the same two dogs. They cannot both be accurate, and the department's own investigation effectively concluded which one was.

The accounting

The department ruled the shooting unjustified and a violation of policy. The City of Detroit — which is to say its taxpayers, not Officer Miller — paid Kira Horne $75,000.

A settlement is not a consequence for the officer, and a policy-violation finding is not discipline; the record contains the first two and no trace of the third.

And what happened to Officer Miller himself was never reported. Whether he was disciplined for a shooting his own department ruled unjustified; whether any consequence attached to a written report his own camera contradicted; whether he stayed on the Gang Intelligence unit, or in the department at all — the public record does not say. Two dogs are dead. The city is $75,000 poorer. The officer's consequences, if there were any, are a blank page.