Deputies Restrained the Dog on Catch Poles, Then Shot It. The Video Came Back Redacted.

It began with a family trying to help. In December 2025, in the Port Huron, Michigan area, a family found a dog outside in freezing temperatures. St. Clair County sheriff's deputies ended up handling the animal.

During that handling, the dog bit a deputy. Officers then restrained the dog with catch poles. And then — with the dog restrained, behind the county's Animal Control facility — they shot and killed it.

The sheriff's office called the dog aggressive.

The sequence in the record is worth reading slowly. The bite came during handling. The catch poles came after the bite; the dog was restrained. The shooting came after the restraint. Whatever threat the dog posed at the moment it bit the deputy, the record describes a dog held on catch poles at the moment officers killed it — behind the building that houses the county's own animal control operation.

Is that what the video shows? The public cannot fully say, and that is now the center of the case. Footage of the shooting has been released only in heavily redacted form. Attorney Philip Ellison filed a federal lawsuit seeking the unredacted video, arguing that the heavy redactions hide the very thing the public needs to see: whether the killing was justified.

The accountability record

No deputy has been publicly named. No discipline has been reported. The sheriff's office's public position consists of a single characterization — the dog was aggressive — plus video redacted in a way that a federal lawsuit now contends conceals whether that characterization holds up.

Consider the posture this leaves the public in. A dog that a family tried to rescue from freezing temperatures is dead, shot while restrained on catch poles behind a county facility. The footage of the killing has reached the public only in heavily redacted form. And the only mechanism available for testing the county's one-word justification is federal litigation — filed not by the government to hold anyone accountable, but by a private attorney simply to obtain the footage.

The lawsuit's argument is straightforward: as long as the redactions stand, no one outside the agency can judge whether the killing was justified. Until a court orders the video released in full, the redactions themselves are the accountability record.