The Cane Corso Died at the Veterinary Hospital. No Discipline Was Reported.

The stop itself was unremarkable: a vehicle without license plates, pulled over on a Saturday evening near Jefferson Heights Drive in Capitol Heights, Maryland, on August 31, 2019. Then a Cane Corso came out of a nearby yard and into the middle of it.

The dog's name was never reported. Neither was the name of the Prince George's County Police Department officer who killed it. In the public record of this shooting, both parties are anonymous: a large dog from somebody's yard, and an armed officer running a traffic stop that the dog had nothing to do with.

According to police, the Cane Corso twice tried to bite the officer in the leg as he backpedaled away from it. The officer drew his firearm and shot the dog. It did not die at the scene. It died of its gunshot wounds at a veterinary hospital. How many rounds were fired was not reported.

That account of the encounter comes entirely from one side. No owner appears in the coverage. There is no reported second version of how the dog approached, no account of what was happening in the yard it came from, and no statement from whoever raised it. What the public knows about the last minutes of this dog's life is what the department said about them.

The investigation

The department's special investigative response team investigated the discharge of the officer's duty weapon — the internal machinery that engages whenever a service weapon is fired. The public record contains no announced findings from that review.

No discipline was reported.

That is the complete accountability record for the killing of this dog: an investigation conducted by the same agency whose officer fired the shot, with no published conclusion, concerning an officer the department never named, over a dog whose name nobody wrote down. The review began inside the institution that did the shooting and, as far as the public record shows, it ended there. A dog walked out of a yard on a Saturday evening in August and died at an animal hospital, and the official response visible to the public amounts to one sentence: the department looked into it.