The video footage clearly shows how Christopher Evans behaved on the early morning of June 12 when he used his skateboard to repeatedly bash the glass door of a transit bus.

There he is, at around 12:45 a.m. outside the Waldorf Hotel on Hastings Street, tossing his skateboard at the windshield of the bus to get it to stop. Then he picks up his skateboard and bashes the front glass door of the bus seven times while demanding the female driver to “open the f**king door.”

“I’m not opening the door, you’re too aggressive,” the driver is heard saying on the video recorded by the bus’s camera trained on the door.

Evans, 33, a construction worker, never did get on the bus. And shortly after his violent outburst, he was taken to the ground in an alley by a Vancouver police dog, which ripped into Evans’s right thigh and calf.

Yes, he says, what he did to the bus was stupid. But it was out of frustration because he claims buses passed him by that summer night. He thinks maybe his tattoos had something to do with it. “Sometimes, they don’t stop, right,” he says.

Despite his actions, Evans doesn’t believe he deserved to have his leg so badly bitten that doctors required more than 100 staples to close the wounds. It’s a case Pivot Legal Society got behind last Friday in launching a lawsuit against the Vancouver Police Department as part of its campaign to have the department review its police dog practices. The legal society believes too many people are unnecessarily bitten by police dogs and the VPD should only use dogs when pursuing armed or dangerous suspects, or for incidents threatening public safety.

The VPD has countered with its own campaign, releasing video footage Monday of Evans bashing the bus and telling their dog handler’s version of events that night in the alley. The VPD also responded to Pivot’s call for an overhaul of the department’s dog training practices in three lengthy reports released over the past three weeks. The VPD concluded its 18 dog handler teams are among the best in the business and the manner in which its German shepherds are deployed is appropriate and carefully monitored.

Deputy Chief Doug LePard got more to the point at last month’s Vancouver Police Board meeting when he reminded board members why police dogs bite. “Don’t forget what they’re doing is arresting criminals who refuse to comply and submit to arrest,” LePard told the board. “They’re not biting people who are saying, ‘Yes, I surrender.’”

LePard’s comments prompted police board member Mary Collins to ask: “So you are satisfied there isn’t an issue?”

LePard: “I’m satisfied there isn’t.”

But then what to make of statistics kept by the Office of the Police Complaint Commissioner that indicate 121 people in the past 22 months required medical attention at a hospital after being bitten by a Vancouver police dog?

The number of dog bites in Vancouver is by far the most recorded of any municipal police department in B.C., with Abbotsford the only other department in double digits at 29.

The police complaint commissioner’s office was unable to provide the extent of injuries suffered in the Vancouver cases, although Evans’ wounds are included in the stats. The stats also include the case of Scott Philippo, a 33-year-old bartender who was bitten in the torso by a police dog Oct. 3, 2010.

Pivot lawyer Douglas King highlighted the case in a written request to the police board to have the VPD review its police dog practices. King wrote that Philippo was mistakenly suspected as a thief after he was seen using bolt cutters to cut through a lock on his own bike on Salsbury Drive.

A police officer with his dog approached and told Philippo to get off the bike. Philippo complied but in the process of the arrest, the officer lost control of his dog and it bit Philippo, King alleges. “We believe the bite Mr. Philippo received would have been clearly prevented with stricter limitations on the use of police dogs, as could other instances of accidental or intentional deployment of police dogs,” King wrote.

Like Evans, Philippo sued the police department for damages suffered from the dog biting him. King says there are talks between both sides about an out-of-court settlement. The VPD is not commenting on the Philippo case.

David Airey, acting deputy police complaint commissioner, acknowledged the high number of dog bites in Vancouver but noted the VPD has one of the largest dog squads in Canada. It also deploys its dog teams to more than 10,000 calls per year, although a dog is not used to apprehend a suspect at every outing. “From our perspective here, we only have one side of the picture, so it’s hard for us to really comment on whether it’s high, low or whatever,” Airey says of the statistics.

The commissioner’s office began tracking dog bite cases as of March 31, 2010, as per changes to the Police Act that required municipal officers to report injuries of a dog bite where a victim is hospitalized.

Since then, Victoria police recorded six dog bite injuries while West Vancouver, Saanich and Central Saanich all recorded two. New Westminster police recorded one dog bite injury.

The job of investigators at the complaint commissioner’s office is to review the injury reports, determine whether using the dog was appropriate and, if warranted, order an investigation. So far, only five people, including Evans, registered complaints with the office about the VPD. And only one mandatory investigation was ordered into an incident that occurred Oct. 22, 2011.

That’s when police arrested a 49-year-old woman armed with a machete in Victoria Park on Commercial Drive. Police say they initially used a Taser, which failed to stop the woman. Officers then fired multiple rounds from a beanbag shotgun, the last round striking the woman in the hand, causing the machete to fall.

A press released issued by the VPD after the incident indicated police arrested the woman with the assistance of a police dog. The Courier was unable to get a response from the police complaint commissioner’s office on the status of the investigation.

As for Evans’ complaint, investigative analyst Rick Milne at the commissioner’s office sent a letter dated Jan. 11, 2012 to Evans concluding there was no abuse of authority by Const. Richard Lee, the dog handler who arrested him.

“It is unfortunate Mr. Evans sustained serious lacerations,” Milne wrote. “However the conclusions and decisions reached by [a VPD inspector] support that Mr. Evans had committed a criminal offence and was knowingly actively resisting apprehension.”

Evans was outraged by the decision, saying the police and the complaint commissioner’s office were covering up the facts. That’s why he launched the civil suit, he says.

His version of events goes like this:

After he stopped bashing the bus with his skateboard, he briefly boarded another bus before exiting on foot to McLean Drive. He went into an alley where—with his earphones on and listening to music—he jumped back on his skateboard.

Next thing he knew, he says, a dog was clamped on to his right calf and he fell to the ground. He says he didn’t hear or see police in the alley. Evans believes he was bitten five times.

“I decided to start skateboarding home and a few minutes later, without warning or anything, I’ve got this dog latched on my calf,” he told the Courier in an interview at the offices of Pivot Legal Society. “I didn’t even realize it was a police dog until halfway through the attack. I looked back and there was this police officer about 30 feet behind just watching.”

Photographs released by Pivot of Evans’s wounds show deep cuts in his thigh and calf, requiring more than 100 staples to close the gashes, according to Evans, who was treated at Vancouver General Hospital. “They could have just got my attention and asked me to stop and I would have,” says Evans, who lives at the Balmoral Hotel in the Downtown Eastside. At Monday’s VPD press conference, Deputy Chief Adam Palmer says dog handler Richard Lee entered the alley with his siren and emergency lights engaged. He then turned off the siren, left the lights on and got out of his vehicle. He ordered Evans to stop, or he would release his dog.

“Mr. Evans continued to run and constable Lee deployed his dog,” Palmer says. “The dog made contact with Mr. Evans. Mr. Evans struggled and as a result the dog had to reapply his bite three times. The dog application lasted briefly before constable Lee could gain control of Mr. Evans.”

At the centre of the police dog debate over the past three weeks is the VPD’s decision to have its dogs “bite and hold” a suspect rather than “bark and hold” a suspect.

The difference in the two methods is just how they are described, although “bark and hold” leaves the decision to the dog to bite a suspect if he or she attempts to flee after being cornered.

In August 2000, the International Association of Chiefs of Police recommended the “bark and hold” method be used by North American police departments. The association’s thinking was this method would reduce unwanted or unwarranted dog bites, although the association cautioned the endorsement was not to be construed as a condemnation of the “bite and hold” method.

Pivot lawyer Douglas King argued in a blog post on the legal agency’s website that when the Los Angeles Police Department used the “bite and hold” method, it sent more people to the hospital than the rest of the 8,450 officers on the force combined. “A raft of civil suits against the LAPD was part of the reason the force switched to the ‘bark and hold’ training method,” King wrote.

In a three-year period before the training method changed, the canine unit sent 639 people to the hospital. In a three-year period after the switch, that number declined to 66, according to a study conducted by the Harvard Medical School.

But in a recent report written by VPD dog handlers Howard Rutter and Bruce Rhode, they say Pivot failed to mention the Harvard study noted the decline in dog bites could also be attributed to the increased scrutiny of the use of force by police in the wake of the Rodney King incident and the ensuing civil unrest that occurred in Los Angeles between April 29 and May 3, 1992.

The only known study that examined the two methods of use of force by police dogs occurred in 2003 in Florida. Rutter and Rhode referenced the $1 million study, which was commissioned by the U.S. Department of Justice, in their report. The findings of the Florida study concluded “bark and hold” dogs have a higher bite ratio than “bite and hold” dogs. This is largely because a “bark and hold” dog tends to bump a suspect and cause them to move, “thus fulfilling the requirements for the bite.”

“Once the dog is released, the handler has now left the decision to use force to an animal that basically has, at best, the decision-making ability of a seven-year-old child,” Rutter and Rhode wrote in criticizing the “bark and hold” method. “That use of force decision should always be left in the hands of an experienced police officer.”

The majority of police departments in Canada and the U.S. continue to use the “bite and hold” method. The VPD has used this method since the dog squad’s inception in 1959.

At the Jan. 18 meeting of the Vancouver Police Board, its members, which include board chairperson Mayor Gregor Robertson, unanimously dismissed Pivot’s call for reforms to the VPD dog squad.

The decision was based on a report that was compiled with information from Rutter and Rhode, who both attended the meeting at the Cambie Street station.

But it was Deputy Chief Doug LePard who answered most of the board’s questions about whether a closer examination of the VPD’s police dog practices was warranted.

“To be convinced [it’s a concern], I would need to see that there actually is an unreasonable number of cases where the dog and dog master have behaved inappropriately and that the use of force was not justified use of force,” LePard says. “I don’t see that from [The Office of the Police Complaint Commissioner], I don’t see that in the court decisions, either civil or criminal. The fact is that our dog masters have an excellent reputation, conduct themselves extremely professionally and that’s borne out in the most important court, which is when they have to account for their actions in the criminal courts.”

Evans, however, won’t be going to criminal court.

That’s because the Crown prosecutor stayed the mischief charge against him for the bus incident. The Crown did this after viewing the photographs of Evans’s leg injuries and learning his lawyer planned a Charter challenge for excessive force at a criminal trial.

“I know it was wrong [to break the bus window] but what happened to my leg far outweighs what I did,” says Evans, who was unable to work for at least two months and continues to feel a loss of sensation or numbness in his leg.

No date has been set to hear his civil suit. Pivot, meanwhile, wants the police complaint commissioner’s office to take a closer look at whether the 121 injuries suffered by victims of VPD dog bites were warranted.

The commissioner’s office isn’t making any promises.

“We don’t have the complaint [from Pivot] asking for that, so we’re waiting for that and then we’ll make an assessment on what action we would take,” says David Airey, acting deputy police complaint commissioner.

mhowell@vancourier.com

Twitter: @Howellings