Before he even got to Snohomish County, Yukon the police dog already knew failure and how it felt to be hanged.
In 1996, the big black-and-tan German shepherd was owned by the Tacoma Police Department, which was then trying to train him for patrol work.
Yukon liked to bite, but not let go. And so one day, his trainers decided to do something about it.
They hoisted the dog into the air by his steel choke chain and leash, and watched him struggle and squirm like a fish on a hook.
Yukon's tongue popped out from between his jaws. His eyes rolled back into his head until he blacked out. But the "stringing up" didn't work as planned. When he regained consciousness, Yukon lunged for a trainer and bit again.
Tacoma police determined that Yukon's biting problem made him "not suitable for police work," according to records obtained by The Herald.
But that didn't stop the Snohomish County Sheriff's Office from buying Yukon in late June 1996. Tacoma police offered the dog for $1,000, a bargain-basement price, after washing him out of their dog-training program -- because he wouldn't stop biting, because nothing, not even being hanged, would curb his behavior.
The sheriff's office knew there were training problems with Yukon but dog handlers here were certain he could be made fit for the street, Sheriff Rick Bart said recently.
"It was a $1,000 gamble," he said.
The gamble wound up costing taxpayers far more, in part because of Yukon's track record of biting people, his failures in training and the sheriff's office's willingness to minimize those problems, records show.
The dog is at the heart of a controversial $412,500 cash settlement Snohomish County reached last month with Mincio Donciev, a Bulgarian burglar who was mauled by the dog when he violently resisted arrest near Darrington on March 1, 1998.
Donciev lost 40 percent of his left foot. Local taxpayers are out nearly half a million dollars county prosecutors agreed to pay so Donciev would dismiss a federal lawsuit alleging the injuries sustained during his arrest violated his civil rights.
Many people in the county are outraged that a criminal got paid for resisting arrest, particularly those who were victims of Donciev's 12-year string of burglaries at cabins and homes around Darrington. Bart has angrily suggested that Donciev's victims file a lawsuit of their own. But the sheriff also last month retired Yukon from police work and has begun to publicly acknowledge his department's police dog program was particularly vulnerable to a legal challenge.
Bart said he wants changes to make sure that doesn't happen again, including seeing state standards adopted to govern the operation of police dog squads. At least one state lawmaker believes Yukon's story demands action by the Legislature. Washington, unlike some other states, has virtually no rules governing police dog training, operations or standards for determining which animals are safe to be on the street.
"We learn from our mistakes and I think we learned some good lessons here," Bart said.
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Yukon's early history is typical of many dogs that wind up being offered for police service, experts say.
He was born in April 1993 at Kadami German Shepherds, a kennel operated by Karen Bostwick of Olympia. He had an impressive pedigree. Both of his parents came from a long line of shepherds who had attained the highest rankings in Schutzhund, a German dog-training sport that translates as "guard dog." Schutzhund dates back to the first world war, and showcases an animal's obedience and its ability to track and protect its master.
Bostwick still has Yukon's picture on the Web site advertising her dog-breeding business. She recalls him as a big, friendly dog.
"This was a dog that was very social, loved kids," the breeder said.
Bostwick hadn't heard much about why Yukon was at the center of one of the largest police dog bite settlements in state history.
Bostwick said she sold the dog to a Tumwater woman who found out that caring for a big shepherd was more than she'd bargained for. The problems became particularly acute when the woman, and Yukon, were injured in a car accident when he was about a year old, she said.
Yukon hurt one of his teeth. That kept him out of much of the training that he would have received had he been following the Schutzhund regimen, Bostwick said. His owner was trying to heal "and she had this huge dog in her backyard and she decided to sell him," she added.
Tacoma police took a look at Yukon in February 1996, and decided to give him a try. The police department's head trainer noted that he appeared to have a good nose that could be used for tracking suspects.
Bostwick said Tacoma police told her there also were old injuries on Yukon's head that indicated he'd been repeatedly hit. It was clear the woman who owned him "could not handle the dog anymore," Bostwick said.
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There were problems with Yukon at Tacoma from the beginning. Police there failed to carefully match the dog to his handler, setting both up to fail, experts say.
Yukon was to have been partnered with a male officer who had just been selected to join Tacoma's dog squad. But another officer challenged the appointment. When department brass checked, they determined the position should have gone to Loretta Cool, a veteran patrol officer and SWAT team member who was interested in becoming Tacoma's first female police dog handler in decades.
Yukon had been purchased to work with somebody much larger than Cool, a Japanese-American woman whose body weight was not that much greater than the dog's, said Artis C. Grant, Cool's Tacoma attorney.
The powerfully built dog had a mind of his own and was big enough to enforce his will. Tacoma's top dog trainer noted Cool had trouble lifting Yukon over a fence. There was no mention the dog weighed nearly as much as she, records show.
Yukon early on had difficulty mastering control of his bite, a key skill for police dogs. Most police departments in Washington train their dogs to bite and hold a suspect who is fleeing or resisting arrest. They also train them to break off the attack, or to stop biting, with a single command.
When Yukon began biting he refused to stop, records show.
Tacoma's police dog trainers placed the blame with Cool. Memos were written questioning her "command presence" to control the dog.
Cool's daily training log for Yukon documented her effort to remain patient and supportive. Yukon's training was to have lasted three months. He still wasn't consistently performing properly four and a half months into training, records show.
Dog-training experts from other police departments were consulted. One trainer recommended more patience and a regimen that would focus the dog's attention away from biting the padded sleeve used in training. Another suggested "stringing up" Yukon, and choking him into submission.
That's what finally happened in June 1996. Yukon was choked unconscious twice, once by hanging. Both times he immediately bit somebody when he revived, records show.
Cool's training log for June 25, 1996, documented Tacoma's decision to wash Yukon out of the program because he'd been deemed "not suitable for police work."
Tacoma police called Snohomish County and said the dog was on the market. Three days later he was in a car headed north.
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Tacoma police and their in-house legal adviser did not respond to The Herald's questions about what happened with Yukon and the decision to sell him to Snohomish County.
Tacoma's head dog trainer clearly tried to fix the blame for Yukon's problems on Cool, training records show. The Snohomish County Sheriff's Office says it only received Yukon's pedigree and veterinary charts from Tacoma.
Lt. Dallas Swank was then supervisor of the sheriff's office dog unit. He said he never heard anything about the dog being hanged. He remembers being told Yukon's handler in Tacoma was the problem.
Snohomish County's dog handlers went to Tacoma, looked at the dog and said he was worth $1,000, Swank said. That is about one-fifth the price the department normally pays for a partially trained police dog.
"I was assured at the time, because I was the sergeant of the unit, that there were no problems and he could make it through training," Swank said.
Cool made it through Tacoma's police dog training program after being assigned a dog other than Yukon. She worked two years in the unit.
In 1998 she filed a federal gender discrimination lawsuit against her department, alleging she was forced out of the dog squad by people who did not want a woman on the team. Tacoma later settled the case out of court for $150,000.
Cool's attorney, Artis Grant, subpoenaed Yukon's Snohomish County records. Grant said the paper trail would have helped build a case that Tacoma's dog trainers had it backward. Cool wasn't the problem, he said. Yukon was.
The paper trail clearly showed "this dog was not an acceptable dog for police work," Grant said.
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Police dogs and lawsuits seem to go together like puppies and chew toys. But what happens when law officers are hauled into court over dog bites varies wildly.
The Los Angeles Police Department in the early 1990s found out how expensive it can be to let a dog squad run on too long a leash. It forked out $3.5 million to settle a flurry of lawsuits after lawyers showed the number of people, especially minorities, seriously injured by police dogs had outstripped any other use of force by the department's officers.
The city of West Palm Beach in Florida was found violating suspects' civil rights in the late 1980s. Officers reportedly kept scrapbooks of photographs of dog bites and some even painted tiny stars on their patrol cars to tally when their dog sank its fangs into a suspect.
Seattle police had their turn in the breach in 1996, when the American Civil Liberties Union hauled them into court for a seven-week trial. The ACLU argued that using police dogs to find and bite suspects violated civil rights. Jurors deliberated just three hours before rejecting the ACLU's claims.
Police have for years insisted there is a major difference between using a gun or baton to subdue a suspect and the damage caused by a dog's teeth, said Donald Cook, one of two California attorneys credited with using the courts to force the L.A. police to reform their dog unit.
"I couldn't go up to that guy and slice him open but it's all OK if I have a dog do it?" he asked. "... There ain't any difference, OK. It's all the same."
Police dog proponents see things differently.
"A properly deployed dog, generally speaking, is going to be equal to or below a baton" in terms of damage to a suspect, said David Reaver, owner of Adlerhorst International, a Riverside, Calif., kennel that has supplied police dogs around the United States since 1976.
Police dogs must be able to bite to protect themselves and their handlers, he said.
Retired Los Angeles County sheriff's deputy Van Bogardus sees things differently. He helped set up the police dog program at his former department in the 1980s. He now is frequently called to testify at trials as a witness against the way most police departments use dogs.
Bogardus said what he saw on the street caused him to question the use of police dogs to find, bite and restrain suspects.
"I started looking at the type of people I was finding and my dog was attacking, and they were petty crooks and people suspected of property crimes," he said.
He also began to question the common law officer belief that using a police dog to track a dangerous suspect gives officers an edge. A dog can actually escalate the situation, particularly if the suspect has a firearm, and brings the weapon into play to protect himself from the dog, provoking a gunbattle, Bogardus said.
Bogardus has been critical of the Snohomish County Sheriff's Office in the past. In 1994, he testified in Snohomish County Superior Court on behalf of a man who suffered nerve and tissue damage when his arm was bitten by a sheriff's police dog that tracked him from the scene of a vandalism in Lake Stevens.
A Snohomish County jury ruled against the sheriff's office, which was required to pay nearly $150,000 in damages and attorneys fees. Seattle attorney Robert S. Bryan said his case directly challenged the notion that it is acceptable to bite any suspect who fails to surrender when tracked by a police dog. He followed up with a lawsuit that was brought by a woman who was bitten on the thigh and arm by the same sheriff's police dog. The woman was a bystander during a police search for her husband. The county paid out $25,000 to settle that case, Bryan said.
The attorney said he was surprised to hear the Snohomish County dog squad once again was paying large amounts of money to somebody bitten by a police dog. In 1994, then-Sheriff Jim Scharf pulled his police dog unit off the street after the jury verdict, Bryan noted.
"We had every reason to hope that if they reinstituted the unit that the lessons learned" would be put to use, he said, adding that he supports the use of police dogs, just not the way they sometimes have been used here.
Scharf, who is now Everett police chief, is familiar with police dogs. He was a dog handler in the military and helped organize the first dog unit at the sheriff's office. He was elected sheriff in 1987 and left to take over the Everett chief job in 1995.
Scharf said he took the sheriff's dog unit off the street because he wanted to "determine the value to the department and to determine the overall scope of the operation."
Everett police have their own dog squad, and Scharf said it was always his intention as sheriff to put the county's dog unit back on the street.
He said that police departments are wise when they treat dog use with the same care they approach policies for using handguns.
"The dog, obviously, is an extension of the use of force. Improperly utilized by the handler, the dog can become a potential liability to the department," he said.
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Donciev's lawsuit was all about the appropriate use of force by police, said Susan Johnson, one of two Seattle lawyers who was appointed by a federal judge to represent Donciev in his civil rights case.
Yukon was one of the first dogs the sheriff's office bought when the department brought back its police dog unit, and records show that he never should have been put on the street, she said.
"The strength of the case was really the history of the dog and that is where our focus was," she said.
The paper trail on Yukon was key. Donciev's lawyers found the records showing how Yukon had failed in Tacoma. They discovered memos documenting his inability to pass his accreditation testing in Snohomish County. They took testimony from Yukon's trainers here that his habit of biting hard and not releasing was only broken by use of an electric shock collar.
Then there were Yukon's bites. The dog sometimes bit people who weren't suspects, she noted, and the injuries he caused to some, especially Donciev, were extreme.
Johnson said that had the case gone to trial, she and her partner on the case, Seattle attorney Mark Shepherd, would have called expert witnesses to testify that a properly trained police dog would only have caused bruises and a few puncture wounds to Donciev's foot, instead of gnawing much of it away.
The U.S. Constitution prohibits police using excessive force during an arrest, Johnson said.
"The court can't sentence you to have a dog gnaw off a part of your body," she said. "In these situations, people are having punishment inflicted before they even are convicted."
Some of those bitten by police dogs are people's children, said Carolyn Kicey of south Everett. Her son, Joseph Ivan Kicey, 21, had part of his scalp chewed away when Yukon grabbed him by the head during an August arrest. The wound exposed the young man's skull, and required 25 stitches to close.
Carolyn Kicey said her son, who was once a standout athlete at Mariner High School, deserved to be arrested because he had become involved in cocaine dealing. He's now serving 3 1/2 years in prison.
"He deserves to be imprisoned," she said. "He deserves to pay a price. But he doesn't deserve to bear a scar, to be mauled and marked for life."
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Sheriff Bart makes no apologies for anything his deputies or Yukon did during Donciev's arrest. The 69-year-old Bulgarian stabbed the dog with a metal-pronged pole. He fought officers and tried to get at two semiautomatic handguns he was carrying.
"What's going on while the dog is gnawing on his foot?" Bart asked. "What is going on?"
At the same time, the sheriff said he had no choice but to retire Yukon. After talking with county attorneys "I didn't think we could successfully defend another incident with Yukon."
County Prosecuting Attorney Jim Krider is careful when he talks about the case. Donciev's lawsuit exposed the county to considerable financial liability, he said. Even if the county had managed to convince a federal jury the Bulgarian was largely at fault and deserved little compensation, his lawyers still would have received attorneys fees, which likely would have been hundreds of thousands of dollars, Krider said.
"Those are the kinds of risk that have to be weighed. It doesn't mean you roll over," he said.
Bart said he doesn't want to have a repeat of the Donciev lawsuit. He's increased supervision of the dog unit, promoting a handler to sergeant and requiring greater review of dog bite incidents.
The sheriff said Yukon's record of performance at the sheriff's office is more than just documents recounting dog bite incidents and training glitches. And that's true. The record shows Yukon went dozens of times to schools and community groups for demonstrations where he mingled with children. The dog also did the amazing things that make police dogs popular with officers, like the night he tracked a suspect into woods and spotted him, sitting in a tree, waiting to slam a log into the skull of a unsuspecting deputy.
The sheriff said he is committed to keeping police dogs on his force because he's convinced they save lives.
The lawman recalled a night, not that long ago, when he faced down a drugged-out suspect who was armed with a knife. The man kept trying to stab him, despite being blasted with pepper spray.
Bart said he had his handgun aimed and was preparing to squeeze the trigger when a police dog bounded out of the dark and wrestled the attacker to the ground.
"I'd probably have shot the guy and I wouldn't have felt good about that," Bart said. When he looked inside the suspect's car, he found the man's young child.
A police dog averted tragedy that night, Bart said.
"You can't put a price on that," he said.
Donciev's lawyer, Johnson, said his case really highlights the need for standards for police dogs and their handlers, and an independent, objective process for evaluating their safety on the street.
"In this suit, our position never was that police dogs shouldn't be used," Johnson said. "If you are going to have a canine unit, you must make sure you have in place a system that allows you to discover and correct the problems."
You can call Herald Writer Scott North at 425-339-3431 or send e-mail to north@heraldnet.com .
You can call Herald Writer Warren Cornwall at 425-339-3463 or send e-mail to cornwall@heraldnet.com .
You can call Herald Writer Jim Haley at 425-339-3447 or send e-mail to haley@heraldnet.com .
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