A Dispatch Autocorrect Sent Waco Police to the Wrong House. Finn Died for It.

The difference between 3204 N. 20th Street and 3204 N. 20th A Street, in Waco, Texas, is one letter. On June 3, 2023, a dispatch autocorrect error erased it. Officers who should have been sent to 3204 N. 20th A Street were dispatched to 3204 N. 20th Street instead — an address that had nothing to do with their call, where a black Labrador named Finn was in the yard of his own home.

An officer shot him there.

The officer said Finn acted aggressively. Finn's owners disputed that. What is not in dispute is where it happened: in Finn's own yard, at a house the police had no reason to visit, reached by way of a software error. Finn was taken to an emergency veterinarian. He died.

Every police shooting of a dog turns on the officer's split-second judgment. A wrong-address shooting adds a harder question underneath: whatever the officer perceived in the yard, the encounter itself should never have occurred. Finn was not the subject of any call. He was a dog at home when armed strangers arrived at the wrong house. Wrong-address shootings recur throughout the national record of police killings of dogs — animals shot in their own yards by officers who believed they were somewhere else — and each one begins with an institutional failure that precedes any split-second judgment.

The Waco Police Department's response addressed the front half of the failure. The department apologized for the address error and said it would change its dispatch procedures. That is a real acknowledgment, and if the procedures change, an autocorrected address may never again send Waco officers to the wrong home.

But look at what the response leaves out. The apology on record is for the typo. The promised fix is to dispatch. For the back half of the failure — the decision, once in the wrong yard, to shoot a dog whose owners say was not acting aggressively — no discipline was reported, and no announced change touches it.

The system that killed Finn was repaired at exactly one point: the software. The officer who fired faced, as far as the record shows, nothing at all.