A woman who was attacked by a Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department dog is suing the county and asking the department to end its “find and bite” canine program.
In a lawsuit filed this week in Los Angeles County Superior Court, attorneys for Rosa Ramirez say the 44-year-old woman was standing outside her front door talking to a deputy last year when an off-leash patrol dog lunged and grabbed her hand, permanently injuring her.
“There should be no more victims like Rosa Ramirez,” attorney Colleen Flynn told The Times on Friday. “The only direction to take with this dog attack program is to end it immediately. These dogs are ‘seek and bite,’ so they don’t just find people, they bite them.”
The Sheriff's Department said in a statement that it had not officially received the complaint, but acknowledged the incident occurred and said it only uses canines under “strict guidelines” in high-risk scenarios.
“The department is dedicated to ensuring that enforcement dogs are used in accordance with our policy and rigorous training standards,” the statement said.
In recent years, police dog programs have come under increasing scrutiny. According to a Marshall Project Research, A nonprofit news site, there is little oversight over how animals are used, even though data shows dog bites send more people to the hospital than any other type of force used by police.
Last year, the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California published a report calling for legislation limit the use of police dogs, noting that they are often used on people experiencing behavioral health crises and sometimes attack bystanders.
Shortly after 9 p.m. on Feb. 22, 2023, sheriff’s deputies searching for a fleeing suspect in South Los Angeles arrived at Ramirez’s door, the lawsuit says. She opened the door and stepped outside, when a 55- to 65-pound patrol dog attacked her from the left. The dog bit Ramirez and tore a large chunk of flesh from her left hand, the lawsuit says.
She was rushed to the hospital, and her injuries ultimately required multiple surgeries and a skin graft. More than a year later, her lawyers say, Ramirez still cannot grasp or write with her left hand and suffers from numbness and limited movement.
“His hand is now permanently disfigured and functionally disabled,” Flynn said at a news conference Friday outside the downtown Hall of Justice, where she was flanked by large posters displaying graphic images of Ramirez's injuries.
In 1980, the suit says, the Sheriff’s Department launched a program that relied on dogs to find criminal suspects. At the time, the suit alleges, department leaders knew the dogs would bite suspects they located. But the suit says they “impermissibly and unreasonably delegated to the dogs the discretion of whether or not to bite suspects,” effectively shifting decisions about how much force to use from humans to the animals.
When officers use other weapons, such as a baton, pepper spray, or gun, they can be held liable for the outcome..
“They avoid responsibility by blaming the dog, and because the dog has no human judgment, they treat it as an accident,” Flynn told the Times. “But these attacks are predictable. It’s not an accident if you’ve been doing it for almost 50 years.”
At one point, the suit points to a 1992 report that warned leaders of “serious problems” in the canine program and showed several instances in which dogs were allowed to continue biting people for far longer than seemed necessary.
“In all this time, they have never learned to control these dogs because they can’t,” Flynn said. “They can’t control where a dog bites someone, how hard it bites them or how much flesh they tear off, and they can’t even control who they bite.”
According to his lawyers, the attack on Ramirez diverted officers from the fleeing suspect who was not found.
The lawsuit does not list the dollar amount Ramirez is seeking in damages.
