City of Vancouver sued for police dog incident

Getting bitten by a police dog when he was mistakenly arrested wasn’t the most terrifying moment for Scott Philippo.

Neither was it the sight of blood dripping from his side onto the street as the 33-year-old bartender lay face down on the ground, his body pinned by a Vancouver police officer.

It was the instant the canine was just inches away from the already-bleeding man’s cheek.

“It was snarling and barking so deafeningly loud and snapping its mouth, like I felt like, ”˜All you have to do is slip and let this dog go,’ ” Philippo recalled in an interview with the Georgia Straight. “It’s going to rip my face. Like it’s just going to bite my eyeballs out.”

Philippo is suing the City of Vancouver. He is seeking $8,000 in general damages, $1,000 in charter damages for having been detained without counsel, $1,000 for the manner in which he was held by the police, and $236 for court filing and service fees.

“They tackled me off of the bike,” he said of the officer and his dog. “The dog jumped up on me as I was falling off the bike. I was on the ground. The whole thing happened quite quickly. The police officer tackled me onto the ground, and then in an attempt to put me in his hold”¦he wasn’t able to keep the dog off of me.”

The incident happened in the morning of October 3, 2010, on Salsbury Drive in East Vancouver. Philippo was suspected of stealing a bike that turned out to be his. After the wounds on the right side of his abdomen were treated by emergency health responders, he was released without charge about an hour after he was detained.

Const. Craig Anderson was alone with his dog Gus when he arrested Philippo by mistake. He filed a report stating that when Philippo began to “swing his leg over the bike to dismount” after the officer ordered him to get off the bike, Gus “lunged at the male contacting him in the right hip area”.

Other officers arrived at the scene later. “I apologized for his injury and he stated he appreciated that and just wanted to leave and go have a coffee,” Anderson reported.

With the help of Pivot Legal Society, Philippo filed a notice of claim in provincial court on April 4 of this year.

“It really comes from kind of a culmination of a few years of just continually getting complaints from people about being arrested and during the course of the arrest, the police dog was used, or they were searching a house and the police dog bit them,” Pivot campaigner Doug King told the Straight in a phone interview.

King also said that Pivot is filing a policy complaint with the city, asking for reforms on how dogs are used by the Vancouver Police Department.

The Pivot lawyer suggested that police dogs should only be deployed when investigating or arresting suspects involved in serious crimes, or those that are either indictable offences or present a serious risk to an individual’s safety.

King also proposed a review on whether or not the VPD should change the training of police dogs to focus on the “find and bark” technique instead of “bite and hold”.

“The current bite-and-hold technique used by the VPD means that every time a police dog is deployed, it is meant to bite the suspect,” he said. “We think they need to have more than one tool and train dogs to only bite if a suspect is in the act of fleeing.”

VPD spokesperson Const. Lindsey Houghton indicated that the force is open to suggestions regarding its policies or tactics.

“We want to be the leader in policing best practices,” Houghton told the Straight by phone. “If there are new ways of doing things that are better, then that’s something that we would definitely consider.”

Houghton said that he cannot comment on Philippo’s claim before the provincial court because it is a pending legal matter.

Looking back at the incident, Philippo said that the attack didn’t change the way he regards dogs.

“I love dogs,” Philippo said. “I actually have been severely attacked by a dog when I was young, and there is no residual fear or skittishness about dogs. I do recall that for a couple of months after the incident, I wouldn’t allow my son to pet random dogs as normally. I usually do let him pet dogs walking on Commercial Drive.”