Detroit Police Shot Jack in His Backyard, Then Put His Body in a Trash Can

On September 4, 2022, Detroit police officers searching for carjacking suspects worked their way into Tiffany Lindsay's backyard. What they encountered there was Jack — the family's dog, in his doghouse.

Police said Jack lunged at a K-9 officer. The officer shot him.

What happened next is not a matter of dueling accounts. Officers put Jack's body in a neighbor's trash can. That is where Tiffany Lindsay found her dog the next day.

The shooting itself exists in the record only as police described it: a lunge, a shot. No video is mentioned, no witness account, no second version of the moment Jack died. The record does not say whether anyone told Lindsay her dog had been shot — only that she found his body in a neighbor's garbage a day later.

In February 2023, Lindsay filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city of Detroit and its police department. The department also reviewed the incident internally. Its investigation cleared the officers of policy violations.

Consider what that finding covers. Officers entered a woman's backyard on a search that had nothing to do with her dog, shot the dog, placed his body in a neighbor's trash can, and left him there for his owner to discover. The Detroit Police Department examined all of it and found nothing that broke its rules. If that conclusion is accurate, the indictment simply moves up a level: a policy that is not violated when a family's dog is shot and disposed of in the garbage is not a policy that failed in this case — it is a policy that allows it.

This is how accountability for these shootings works in most of the country. The department investigates itself, applies its own rules, and announces its own exoneration. The only independent forum left to the family is a civil courtroom — and only because Lindsay took her case there herself.

No officer was publicly named. No policy violation was found. The officers who shot Jack and put him in the trash faced, as far as the public record shows, no consequence of any kind. The only accountability on record is the federal civil rights lawsuit his owner had to file on her own.