Police K-9 Unit in Dog Fight With Critics : Law enforcement: Lawsuit claims hundreds of people have been needlessly mauled. LAPD contends most bites are provoked.

Volker’s mission was to find a fleeing gang member who had taken part in a pre-dawn shooting in Hollywood and slipped away. But when Volker, a German shepherd in the Los Angeles Police Department’s K-9 unit, emerged from a nearby toolshed, his jaws were locked around the arm of someone other than the gunman.

Hortencio Torres, 25, had been living in the shed, and he had nothing to do with the 1988 shooting incident. Two years later, the restaurant dishwasher, whose right forearm had been ripped open by Volker, won a $65,000 settlement from the city of Los Angeles.

Although city officials insist that the Torres case was unusual, critics--already angered by the police beating of Rodney G. King--contend that the misguided use of force displayed in that incident has long been prevalent in the department’s K-9 corps.

In a class-action lawsuit filed recently by a coalition of civil rights groups and public interest lawyers, the plaintiffs claim that Los Angeles police dogs have mauled hundreds of people who posed no threat to officers, harming both innocent bystanders and criminal suspects who were bitten after surrendering to police.

“These dogs are deadly force, and the cops are using them to terrorize people,” said Donald Cook, one of the attorneys who joined the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California and the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund in filing the suit.

Police spokesman Cmdr. Robert S. Gil said the department has no comment on its canine policy in the wake of the suit. But the department’s lawyers deny allegations that police dogs are used in nonviolent situations, that dog handlers receive inadequate training and supervision and that the animals are purposely used in black and Latino neighborhoods.

“We have one of the finest and most highly trained canine units in the United States,” said Deputy City Atty. Mary E. House. “We are a model for many jurisdictions . . . in both ongoing training and certification and the use of dogs in the field.”

While police do not dispute the fact that more than 1,000 people have been bitten by police dogs during the past three years, House said that at least 80% of the bite injuries required nothing “more than a Band-Aid.”

“Their allegation that we routinely maul and attack (people) is untrue,” she said, “and our statistics prove that it is a distortion.”

House said police records show that the canine unit conducted 8,043 searches from 1988 to 1991 and engaged in 1,035 “contacts” between police dogs and criminal suspects where a suspect was bitten. In those incidents, police arrested 2,410 people, resulting in a “bite rate” of nearly 43%--a figure derived after dividing the number of cases where a suspect was bitten by the number of arrests.

This year, that rate has dipped sharply to 26%, House said. From January through May of 1991, there have been 74 bites reported by police and 280 people arrested, she said. Of those bitten, 34 were armed suspects.

“What people have to realize is that it is not necessarily the handler or the department that determines whether there is contact with a dog,” House said. “It is the suspect that determines that contact by provoking the dog or resisting (arrest). And many of those bitten are armed felony suspects.”

Critics claim the department’s statistics are misleading in that they do not generally record the number of non-suspects who are bitten by police dogs, and some of the injuries are minimized by officers in their reports.

The Times has obtained thousands of pages of Canine (K-9) Search Data reports filed routinely by dog handlers after they are called out on assignment. The documents include reports on more than 6,400 canine searches conducted from 1984 through April, 1990. They show that:

* Although the ethnicity of bite victims could not be determined in the majority of reports, in those cases where race was known, blacks and Latinos made up more than 97% of the dog bite victims.

* The divisions where police dogs were most often deployed and where most bites were reported were the 77th, the Southwest and the Newton divisions--which patrol largely minority communities but which also are considered among the higher-crime areas of the city.

* Few of the incidents where the canine corps was summoned involved violent crimes. Most of the suspects were arrested on burglary and theft charges, including car theft.

* In 85% of the cases where a suspect was encountered by police during a canine search, there was no record that the person was armed.

“Most of the victims are people who pose no dangers--kids out joy riding, car thieves, petty burglars and criminals,” said attorney Cook, whose law firm specializes in dog bite cases. “Those people bear the brunt of these dog attacks.”

In recent weeks, numerous critics have testified about police dog activities before the Christopher Commission--the independent panel investigating the Police Department--and have appeared before other public panels, displaying gruesome color photographs of dog bite victims and arguing that the department’s K-9 unit is out of control.

Karol Heppe, executive director of the Police Misconduct Lawyer Referral Service, said her organization received citizen complaints about police dogs long before the King incident. “The police are ready to mete out justice on the streets even though these people do not pose a threat to them,” she said. “They are pumped up and ready to let their dogs attack. They are punishing people with these dogs and getting away with it without much oversight.”

Heppe said that in 1990, her group received 19 complaints accusing Los Angeles police canines and their handlers of using excessive force. All but two involved black or Latino victims, she said. This year, she said, there have been 10 complaints--also mostly from minorities in low-income neighborhoods.

“If you use the dogs the same way in the Anglo community, there would be tremendous outrage,” said Bill Lann Lee, western regional counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. “I think it’s a sad and tragic fact that those dogs are used disproportionately in minority communities, and at the very least that should be investigated.”

The Christopher Commission, whose report is scheduled to be released Tuesday, said it is reviewing complaints from people who claim they were needlessly injured by police dogs.

The police canine program began in 1980 and has 18 dogs whose primary function is to search for felony suspects or lost people, according to the department’s canine unit manual. Since the program began, four police dogs have died on duty. The first died in a fall from a roof during a chase. Two died when they were stabbed by suspects. The fourth was killed after he and his handler, who survived, were shot.

To officers and supporters of the program, the fatalities underscore the risks that handlers and their dogs face, and are reminders that suspects often provoke a dog attack. But critics say citizens are more likely to sustain serious wounds without provocation.

“Some of these dogs bite automatically and their handlers encourage it,” said Charles Brugnola, a former dog handler for the Hawthorne Police Department who has testified as an expert witness for plaintiffs suing Los Angeles police. “I liken it to a search-and-destroy mission. It has no place in police work.”

Although there is no national standard for bite rates, officials have said their K-9 unit is “about average” when compared to police departments that count dog bites in the same manner.

But critics point out that other metropolitan police departments have records superior to the 74 bites recorded this year by Los Angeles police. In Philadelphia, for example, where there are nearly 40 patrol dogs, there have been no bites reported in the first six months of 1991, according to a police spokeswoman. In Houston, where there are 19 police dogs, there have been 19 reported dog bite cases over the same period.

The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, which has 15 dogs in its K-9 program, also has been the target of allegations that many suspects--most of them blacks and Latinos--are needlessly bitten during searches.

Chief Raymon Morris, who oversees the department’s K-9 units, said bites were reported in 38% of the cases this year where sheriff’s dogs were used and conceded that most of those bitten may have been minorities. But a higher crime rate in a neighborhood rather than its ethnic makeup is the reason for any disparity, he said.

“To me, that’s not a factor so much of race as it is a factor of the sort of activities that go on in certain areas of our community,” Morris said.

In the Hortencio Torres case, the Los Angeles City Council’s Budget and Finance Committee concluded that the dishwasher who was mistaken for a shooting suspect was bitten after “the dog either failed to respond quickly enough when called off, or was not called off soon enough.”

But while most of those bitten in Los Angeles have been suspects sought by police, even fellow law-enforcement officers have not been immune to injuries.

In January, 1989, California Highway Patrol Officer William Pinzon was helping Los Angeles police search for robbery suspects who had fled in a car chase and slipped into a wooded area.

After a police dog named Dolf spotted one of the suspects crouching in a tree, the canine was called from the tree to allow the suspect to climb down. As he did so, the dog excitedly circled his handler, who was standing near Pinzon. Suddenly, the dog bit the CHP officer in the face, tearing his ear lobe and gashing his cheek.

Thirty minutes later, Dolf was back in a patrol car being driven to the site where another suspect had been seen. When the patrol car stopped, the dog bolted toward a man running across a vacant lot close to a hovering helicopter. As his handler called futilely after him, Dolf sped forward and grabbed his target--a tow truck driver named Greg Landis, who had been summoned by police to remove one of the vehicles involved in the car chase.

Last month, Pinzon received $40,000 and Landis received $18,000 to settle their lawsuits against the city.