The dog wouldn’t stop biting. That’s what Olivia Sligh remembers most from the incident that landed her in the hospital in July 2018.

Sligh’s boyfriend called police, frantic. His 24-year-old girlfriend was hurting herself and needed help. She had reacted badly to her new psychiatric medication.

When two Conroe police officers arrived at their home on Plantation Drive, Sligh had fled into the nearby woods in an attempt to avoid being taken to the hospital.

The officers and their German shepherd followed. When they found her, an officer asked if she had any weapons, Sligh said. She didn’t.

One officer reached out, to pull her to her feet. That’s about when the police dog lunged at her and began biting. She started screaming but says the officers didn’t help.

“He was just standing there,” she said, of the dog’s handler. “It felt very wrong to me.”

By the end of the encounter, she’d been bitten half a dozen times on her ankle, thigh and hip.

BAIL DISPUTE:

In a lawsuit, her attorney, Randall Kallinen, claims the Conroe Police Department’s handling of the situation violated Sligh’s Fourth Amendment rights, showed a failure to intervene in a situation involving excessive force, and violated the Americans with Disabilities Act.

“A dog is like a gun,” he said. “It’s a weapon an officer can use and it is controllable. It’s not the gun’s fault it shot someone, it’s not the dog’s fault it bit someone, it’s the handler’s fault.”

Conroe Police Department officials were not immediately available Saturday afternoon to discuss the case. Law enforcement’s use of police dogs has drawn controversy around the country for decades, however.

Los Angeles-area police departments came under fire in the 1990s over their use of police K-9s. A 1990s study found more than half of criminal suspects bitten by police dogs who were treated at Los Angeles County’s jail ward emergency department suffered three or more bites. About a fifth of the 800 people whose cases were reviewed in the study suffered complications, including bleeding, infections, broken bones and nerve injury. Civil rights attorneys sued Los Angeles, and the city later settled for $3.6 million and agreed to overhaul its policies related to its police dogs.

But problems have plagued other departments more recently.

A Seattle Times investigation in 2013 found at least 17 people who said they were mistakenly attacked by police dogs in Washington over a five-year period. The agencies involved in those cases paid nearly $1 million in damages, according to the newspaper’s investigation.

And the San Diego Police Department came under fire in 2016 after video emerged of police officers allowing a dog to bite a naked, unarmed man for more than 40 seconds after officers had restrained him.

PARAMEDICS:

The St. Paul Police Department in Minnesota came under scrutiny in 2018 after police dogs chasing criminal suspects bit bystanders. An investigation by the Minneapolis Star Tribune found officers lost control of their K-9s on occasion, dogs regularly apprehended people with no instruction from handlers and dogs attacked some bystanders. The department later dramatically curtailed its use of police dogs.

Local community activists have also raised concerns about law enforcement agencies’ use of police dogs. One such case came in February 2019 in Baytown, after a police dog bit a 29-year-old man his handler was arresting. The police department disputed any improper use of force.

Sligh was never charged with any crime. In the years since she was bitten, she moved to Missouri with her boyfriend to be near his family. She is raising her two children and doing better, she said. She is off medication and no longer in therapy.

But she still has flashbacks about the incident and is dealing with injuries she believes are related to the encounter.

She has always loved dogs — she has a boxer mix named Walker — but she can’t stand to be around German shepherds anymore.

She hopes the lawsuit will prod the department into examining its use of police dogs.

“They need to train longer or better or something, so this doesn’t happen to other people,” she said. “It was very traumatizing.”

st.john.smith@chron.com

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