The Dog Charged Three Times and Bit His Boot. The Chief Said Video 'Fully Clears' Him.

The dog had a history before Officer Matt Pritchard ever saw it. The reports that brought Summerville police out on July 17, 2019, described an aggressive dog that had previously attacked a pedestrian — a white boxer and pit bull mix in the Chattooga County, Georgia town. Its name, if it had one, was never reported.

The encounter, as reported by AllOnGeorgia: the dog charged Pritchard. It charged him a second time. He used OC spray, and the spray failed. The dog charged a third time and bit his boot. Pritchard fired one round, and the dog died.

The department's verdict came from its chief, who said the body camera video "fully clears the officer."

On the facts the record contains, the sequence is specific and escalating: a dog with a reported prior attack on a person, two charges, a less-lethal option tried and failed, a third charge, a bite. One shot followed all of that. If the record is accurate, the OC spray came out before the gun did — an attempt to end the encounter without killing the dog, made and defeated before the trigger was pulled.

But even a shooting that reads as defensible deserves an honest description of who judged it. The verdict came from inside. The chief of the officer's own department announced that video cleared his own officer. No outside review was reported. No independent examination of the footage appears in the record — only the chief's characterization of it, offered on the department's behalf. "Fully clears" is a conclusion, and the public got the conclusion; whether anyone outside the Summerville Police Department ever tested it against the video, the record does not say.

The accounting: no discipline was reported, and no charges. The chief said the video fully clears Officer Pritchard, and there the public record ends — a dead dog with a reported history of attacking a person, a bitten boot, a canister of OC spray that failed, and a department that served as the only reported judge of its own officer's shot. Even in the cases that look most defensible, the verdict is delivered the same way: the department grades itself, announces the grade, and closes the file.