GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. (WOOD) — A retired police officer who worked with K-9s for 20 years said a suspect can still pose a threat even while being attacked by a dog.
Partial bodycam video from Wednesday night’s fatal shooting by Grand Rapids police show a K-9 attacking Da’Quain Johnson in the moments before an officer shot and killed the 32-year-old.
“Don’t think the dog by itself can totally incapacitate somebody because it can’t,” Roy Taylor, a law enforcement veteran with 20 years of experience as a K9 handler, said in a Zoom interview with News 8. While he cautioned that he cannot assess whether the fatal shooting of Johnson was justified because he has not thoroughly reviewed all of the police bodycam footage, he said, in general, “Just because the dog has one arm or one limb and is moving the person around, that doesn’t mean the person has lost the use of their other arm.”
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Taylor, who now runs Taylor Consulting Group, also added that police are not required to wait to see a gun or have a gun pointed at them before they use deadly force.
A 1989 U.S. Supreme Court ruling set forth a standard known as “objective reasonableness” for evaluating police actions based on what the officer knew at the time, not 20/20 hindsight…