Ruby, a pit bull, was in the Winnetka neighborhood of Los Angeles on November 4, 2021, when LAPD officers arrived on a report of a "vicious dog."
What happened next depends entirely on who is telling it.
Police said Ruby aggressively charged the officers while barking. Ruby's owner, Corey Lennon, disputed the police account.
What is not in dispute is what an officer did: fired a beanbag shotgun round that struck Ruby in the head.
Ruby survived and was expected to recover — a fact worth pausing on, because it is the reason this story is a dispute over a wounded dog rather than a dead one. A round to the head, even a beanbag round, is not a warning. Ruby's survival is the margin between this article and a eulogy.
The LAPD released body-camera footage of the shooting. That release is, in one sense, more transparency than many departments offer; the public can look at the same frames the department looked at. But the footage did not settle the question. Police maintained the dog charged aggressively. Lennon maintained otherwise, and said he would file a civil suit.
That is where the accountability record stands, and it is thin.
The officer who fired was not publicly named. No discipline was reported. No finding against the department was reported. The dispute between the official account and the owner's — charged, or didn't — was left exactly where it started, unresolved by any process inside the department that the public can see.
Whatever resolution comes will apparently have to be purchased by the owner himself, through the civil suit he said he would bring. That is the shape of accountability in these cases: the department releases the video, states its version, and moves on. If a dog's owner wants more — a ruling, a judgment, an answer — the burden is his to carry into court, at his own expense, against a city with lawyers already on salary.
Ruby recovered. The record of what the LAPD did about the officer who fired a beanbag round into a dog's head is a blank page.