Chino Clamped Onto a Police K-9's Muzzle. The Handler Shot Him in the Head.

Chino, a white pit bull, was the family dog at a Detroit home, and in August 2020 he was where a family dog is supposed to be: inside his own fenced yard.

What came past the fence was a Detroit Police Department K-9 unit, searching the area for a discarded gun. Body-camera footage captured what happened when the police dog reached the fence line. Chino rushed it and clamped onto the K-9's muzzle.

The K-9's handler fired a single shot into Chino's head.

Chino did not die right away. He was taken to an emergency veterinarian, where he was euthanized.

The department's response came from the top. Chief James Craig backed the officer. The case was reviewed by DPD's Professional Standards section and forwarded to the Wayne County Prosecutor's Office; the record reports no charges resulting from that referral, and no discipline either.

Consider the sequence the department stood behind. Its K-9 unit brought a working dog to the edge of a private, fenced yard where a family pet lived. When the two animals tangled at that fence line, the handler's response was a bullet into the pet's skull. Whether anything else was tried first — whether anything else could have separated two dogs at a fence — is not a question the record shows anyone in authority pressing. The chief's public backing of the officer answered it in advance.

The lawsuit

Chino's owner, Rosemary White, was left to seek accountability herself. In March 2022, she filed a lawsuit against the city and the officer.

That suit is the only avenue in the record through which the killing of Chino might yet cost anyone anything. The internal review went to Professional Standards. The referral went to the prosecutor. Nothing public came back from either — no reported charges, no reported discipline — while the chief of police had already told the city whose side the department was on. A family's dog met a police dog at his own fence and was shot through the head for what happened there, and every official channel that examined the shooting has, as far as the public record shows, produced exactly nothing.