Grandmother Joins List of Plaintiffs Alleging Attacks by Police Dogs

A 66-year-old grandmother said in a claim filed Tuesday that a police dog injured her, sending her to the emergency room and prompting her to join a growing number of plaintiffs suing the city of Los Angeles over such attacks.

“I want somebody to do something about it,” Clara Mae Pierce said in a videotaped interview released by the American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing plaintiffs suing the city over attacks by police dogs. “The law broke into my life and almost did me in.”

Pierce’s allegations are the latest in a litany of complaints filed against the Los Angeles Police Department’s K-9 units, which have been accused of inflicting injuries on hundreds of suspects who posed no danger to officers.

In her case, Pierce said she was letting out her small dog on the evening of Jan. 14 and stepped into her back yard to see whether any cats were outside. When she opened her back door, she said, a police dog attacked her, knocking her backward and preventing her from escaping into the house.

The dog was “like a lion fixing to leap on me,” Pierce said. “That’s what he looked like.”

Pierce said she was bitten on the upper parts of both legs, and has been billed by the hospital emergency room where she was treated. She said she also suffered from nightmares and was afraid to go out her back door for months.

“I think dogs should be banned because somebody’s going to get killed,” Pierce said. “Maybe it might be somebody’s child, and that’s wrong. These are people. These are no squirrels or deer or animals that you hunt with dogs.”

Police spokesman Bill Frio declined to comment on the case, saying it is the department’s policy not to discuss the subject of pending litigation. A copy of the police incident report describes Pierce’s injuries as “minor” and says an investigation at the scene “found no misconduct and no variation from department policy.”

The report also indicates that officers were pursuing a murder suspect on foot in Pierce’s neighborhood that evening.

Pierce was added as a plaintiff to a class-action lawsuit contending that police dogs have viciously mauled hundreds of people, most of them black or Latino, without cause. That suit was filed last year and is pending in Los Angeles Superior Court.

The suit asks that the K-9 unit be shut down “until dog handlers and dogs are adequately selected, trained, supervised and disciplined.”

The suit also seeks unspecified damages on behalf of more than 900 people who, it says, were mauled by Police Department dogs in the last three years.

In January, a group of activists--including representatives of the ACLU and the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People--asked the Police Commission to halt use of the animals temporarily. The commission did not approve the moratorium, but said it would investigate the allegations that the dogs have been used improperly.

At that hearing, Police Chief Daryl F. Gates, a defendant in the lawsuit, defended the use of the dogs. They “do a marvelous job for the people of this city,” he said.

In her videotaped statement, Pierce sharply disagreed with Gates’ contention. She asked the City Council to approve a moratorium immediately.

“This is wrong, councilmen,” she said in the video. “You all get up off your behinds and do something about it.”