In April 2019, an Oakland police dog who’d been unleashed to chase down fleeing robbery suspects clenched his teeth around the leg of an 18-year-old Oakland resident, biting through to the bone.
In December 2020, a Vacaville police officer was captured on camera pinning a police dog on the ground and hitting it in the face during a training exercise, in a video that went viral and spurred demands that the officer lose their job.
Although 50 miles away and more than a year apart, these two high-profile cases involving local police dogs share a connection: both involve an Oakland Police Department officer named Marcell Patterson.
As a senior member of OPD’s K9 unit, Patterson has been working with police dogs since at least 2004. More recently, he helped a Netherlands-based dog-vending company called Dutch K9…
