It’s Sad That Bruno the Police Dog Has Died. Now Retrieve the Bullet for Ballistics Testing.

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This piece is going to be controversial, but if you don’t agree with it you should be prepared to say why.  And, in doing so, you’re probably going to reveal yourself to be a bigot.  But we’ll get to that in time.

Bruno the Police Dog, now immortalized in sculpture in La Palma Park, died today at around 5:55 a.m. — twelve hours before this is being posted — of complications from his being shot during the police arrest of gang member Robert Andrew “Lil Clumsy” Moreno Jr. in Anaheim.  (I’ll refer to him here by his nickname, as Anaheim has lots of prominent people named “Moreno”.)  You don’t have to be a fan of the use of police dogs to be sad about that, just like you don’t have to be pro-war to want to see military veterans honored with a cemetery in Irvine.  In both cases, the service being done is more to the bereaved than to the deceased.

The death of Bruno, however, gives an opportunity to settle, once and for all, the question of how specifically he died.

If everything happened the way the police report says it happened, then Bruno had been set loose to find a suspect after a call that someone had fired on probation officers.  Bruno found Lil Clumsy, who had been hiding in (or, some early reports had said, behind) a trash dumpster — and who shot him through the jaw, with the bullet lodging in a lung.  Lil Clumsy continued shooting at officers, hitting no one.  This led to a fusillade of bullets from the three officers on the scene.  Lil Clumsy’s corpse was found with 23 bullet wounds.

If that is what happened, then the shooting was presumably justified.  I say only “presumably” because a suspect who wants to surrender should be given the opportunity to do so; otherwise it’s an unlawful summary execution.  It’s surely understandable, though, that someone who has fired a gun and wounded a living being is not likely to get a whole lot of consideration.  (Frankly, the DA would not likely get a conviction of officers for unjustified homicide unless a dozen witnesses testified that Lil Clumsy had jumped out of the trash can and lay face-down on the asphalt naked with his hands behind his back begging for his life.  And even then, his being nicknamed Lil Clumsy might mean an acquittal.)

The report from OC District Attorney’s office concluded — based on an investigation that seemed to consist of hearing the officers’ side of the story, finding it “credible,” and closing the inquiry — that the killing was justified.  Deputy District Attorney Barbara Kim reported at the time that “It will defy logic for anybody to conclude that under these circumstances the (Anaheim Police Department) officers were not reasonably justified in firing at Moreno in self defense.”

Well, hold on there, partner.  While it’s probably true — and I don’t recall right now whether they ever found the many bullets that Lil Clumsy had fired at officers other than Bruno, or matched them to his gun, etc. — that conclusion is not logically required.  I might accept that there’s a 90% likelihood that it’s true — or maybe 95%, 99%, or even 99.9% or more — but there are good reasons for doubting it.  These include:

• The OCDA’s office has been known to lie — sometimes egregiously, as in the cases involving “jailhouse snitches.”
• Anaheim police officers have been accused, in my opinion credibly, of use of excessive force towards Latino male youth in particular.
• Craig Hunter, a former Anaheim police commander who was accused of planting a gun at the site of the killing of Joey Acevedo (son of the now-wife of the publisher of this blog), was close to OCDA Tony Rackauckas before this killing and when hounded out of Anaheim went to work for Rackauckas as his chief investigator.
• There were apparently no non-police witnesses to the shooting, so no danger of any contradiction of police testimony.
• Police-endorsed Anaheim Councilwoman Lucille Kring wrote an email in response to the shooting of Lil Clumsy  saying “The shooting saved us a trial.  Always a good outcome.”  So the police had little reason to fear that they were displeasing at least one of their bosses, in the Council majority for the past three years, by coming home with a corpse rather than a convict.
• Once again, based on my reading of the investigation of the time it was credulous and rather thin.  If you go in concluding that your witnesses will never lie and that any possible cause for alarm can easily be explained away, then investigating is easy!  Too easy.

These sorts of concerns have contributed to a tremendous amount of distrust and non-cooperation on the part of Anaheim’s Latinos in particular towards their police force.  I know people who will read my “90% chance that it’s true” figure up there and scoff at me, saying that I’m obviously in the pocket of the APD.  (To my knowledge, I’m not, and I think that they’d be surprised to hear the speculation.)  But the problem — and is not a few other people’s problem, it’s a problem for all of us — is that many Anaheim residents think that their police can get away with murder.

Let’s say that you, the Reader, think that the odds that the police got away with murder here — that they essentially shot Lil Clumsy without giving him the opportunity to surrender after he shot Bruno (intentionally? accidentally, given his nickname? we’ll never be able to ask him) — or, even worse, that Bruno was a victim of “friendly fire.”  In other words, is it possible that police fired 24 bullets hit flesh, and that one of them injured Bruno?  Not necessarily likely, just possible?

It’s certainly not hard to imagine that one bullet in a storm of 24 could go awry — or, for example, could ricochet off something in the bin back at Bruno.  Lots of people believe that something like this could have happened, because they believe that police lie.  (And, frankly, if a beloved police dog were killed by friendly fire, it would take a very strong ethic not to blame it on the perp, rather than admitting it.  I’d like to think that the police would never do that — but I’d also like to believe that what happened in the snitch scandal couldn’t happen.)

The narrow silver lining to the dark cloud of Bruno’s death is that we can now test that possibility.  Do an autopsy — videotaped and in front of some disinterested parties — and remove the bullet.

The bullet couldn’t be removed before because doing so would endanger Bruno’s life.  Bruno has lost his life.  Now it can be retrieved.  Then do a ballistics test to see whether it came from a police firearm or from whatever gun Lil Clumsy had.  (Or, if they don’t have bullet holes from his gun at the scene, allegedly had.)

If the bullet came from Lil Clumsy’s gun, as seems very likely, then reasonable doubt is (for most people) set to rest and the reputation of police is improved.  If it isn’t — and lots of misbehavior took place, including friendly fire — then we have a lot to discuss.  And if the police acted that badly — not just the friendly fire, but possibly a summary execution and a coordinated lie about what happened, later bolstered by a diffident OCDA investigation — then we would need to discuss it all desperately.

So let’s get started.  Go in and get the bullet while we can — and see what it tells us.