JSO officers sends K9 on unarmed man, prompting federal lawsuit

Finding videos takes time and effort, keep me motivated by donating to https://paypal.me/thisisbutter
-----
A Jacksonville man is suing the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office and three officers, arguing his constitutional rights were violated during a traffic stop when one of those officers sicced a K9 on him and forced him to crawl back to the handler before releasing the dog from his maimed right arm, leaving a trail of blood in the street.

Later, according to video of the stop, one of the officers said Joseph Bratcher was bitten because he “didn’t want to comply with us, and he’s acting like a fool.”

In federal court filings, the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office and the officers defended their actions during the May 2023 traffic stop in Northwest Jacksonville, which took place near a fatal shooting scene. Bratcher, now 35, was in a gray Mazda sedan when, according to a police report, a JSO officer on his way to the shooting scene accused Bratcher of dangerously speeding toward him, which became the impetus for the traffic stop.

The police charged Bratcher with reckless driving and resisting without violence, but the State Attorney’s Office ultimately dropped those charges months later.

It’s not clear if the officers that day suspected Bratcher of fleeing the scene of the shooting, though he was never accused of being involved.

Bratcher’s lawsuit, filed in November, claimed the traffic stop nonetheless exacted a painful price, requiring immediate hospitalization at UF Health and leaving him with “significant scarring and disfigurement.”

Jail records show he had to post a $4,000 bond to get out the day following his arrest.

Video of the encounter captured by a JSO bodycam shows a tense but nonviolent scene until a JSO officer commanded a K9 to bite Bratcher as he appeared to be haltingly complying with a demand that he slowly walk backward. That followed several minutes during which Bratcher was slow to follow orders from JSO officers to exit his vehicle, protesting alternately that he was frightened, unarmed, suffered from PTSD and didn’t know the reason for the stop.

At least six officers, some with guns drawn, were on scene.

Bratcher faces a high bar to prevail in a lawsuit of this kind, but legal and policing experts contacted by The Tributary said the arrest report and body-cam video depicted a potentially problematic traffic stop, even if it’s not enough to ultimately win Bratcher damages.

“The officers do not claim, in anything that I reviewed, that they thought he had a weapon or that they thought he was going to attack them or that he was going to lunge toward them,” said Michael Benza, a Case Western Reserve University School of Law professor who reviewed the video and police report for The Tributary. “There doesn’t seem to be any of the threat issues that typically justify the use of force.”

“It seems simply like, ‘We are tired of dealing with this guy. We are going to put him in handcuffs, and so we’re going to use the dog,’” Benza said.