A Los Angeles police officer drew his handgun and fired four times at a 2-year-old Saint Bernard doodle named Jameson as the dog moved down an apartment passageway, all during what was supposed to be a routine wellness check. The LAPD released bodycam footage of the shooting on Friday, and the video has renewed hard questions about how officers handle encounters with household pets and whether department training matches department policy.

The footage, first reported by the Los Angeles Times, lasts a few minutes and comes from two body cameras. It shows officers arriving at the 7500 block of Jordan Avenue in Los Angeles at 8:55 p.m. on a Saturday evening after a neighbor reported hearing a woman screaming inside her apartment. Marie Marseille, the dog's owner, told NBC4 that her family had been celebrating the Knicks' NBA Championship win.

A wellness check. A family watching basketball. A pet that never left the apartment complex. And four gunshots.

What the bodycam footage shows

The video captures two unnamed LAPD officers approaching Marseille's apartment door. The first officer spots Jameson and says, "Jeez, that's a big a** dog." The second officer, standing slightly down the passageway, responds: "I ain't getting bit by that, bro."

The first officer asks Marseille about the dog. She tells him, "he's not aggressive." The officer remarks to his partner that the dog is "huge, you know what I mean?" and directs Marseille to "put him in", telling her to secure the animal inside.

Marseille closes the door temporarily. The second officer unholsters his gun and backs away from the barking dog, then puts the weapon away after the door shuts. But when Marseille returns to the door, Jameson comes past her and moves down the passageway toward the second officer. The officer draws his handgun again and fires four times.

Marseille screams "No!" Footage from the aftermath, which went viral before the bodycam release, shows her sobbing over Jameson's body while neighbors angrily confront the officers.

Marie Marseille later told NBC4:

"Next thing I know, he was on the ground. I see the officer shoot him twice. I did see that. I was right there when it happened."

Her sister, Vanessa Marseille, told the Los Angeles Times in a phone interview:

"We just don't know why it happened. What's more scary is that those shots could have hit her or anyone. It was reckless. It's just tragic."

LAPD policy versus LAPD practice

The gap between what the department's own directive says and what these officers actually did is worth examining closely. LAPD Use of Force Directive No. 11, written in December 2023, governs how officers should handle dog encounters. It advises officers arriving at a scene to assess whether a dog may be present. It reminds them their main concern upon arrival is "safety." It states that all dogs can bite.

The directive lists several alternatives before lethal force: voice commands, pepper spray, a baton, a TASER, or a fire extinguisher. It notes that "a continuous reverse spin movement can deter an approaching animal." If necessary, a dog should be struck in the nose or throat. None of these alternatives appear to have been attempted in the bodycam footage.

On lethal force specifically, the directive sets a clear standard: it may be used only "when it's reasonable to protect the officer or other person/s from an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury." And the policy explicitly warns that "the size and speed of an animal can increase the potential of a missed shot and possibility of an officer or bystander being critically injured by a bullet."

That last line deserves a second read. The LAPD's own training document warns officers that firing at a moving dog puts bystanders at risk. Marseille was standing feet away when the shots were fired. Vanessa Marseille's concern, "those shots could have hit her or anyone", echoes the department's own written guidance.

The directive also flatly states: "Officers may not use lethal force against a dog to protect property including other animals." The only justification is imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury to a person. Whether a Saint Bernard doodle moving down a hallway meets that threshold is exactly what the investigation will have to answer.

In a case that shares some procedural parallels with other recent bodycam releases of officer-involved shootings, the footage itself has become the central piece of evidence, and the central source of public outrage.

The neighbor who called it in

The unnamed neighbor who placed the call told NBC4 she heard screaming from Marseille's apartment, called out to her, and got no response. She dialed police out of concern for her neighbor's welfare. She never imagined what would follow.

"I feel responsible for what happened," the neighbor said. "That's not how I thought a wellness check would go."

She also described the officers' knocks on Marseille's door as sounding "hostile", a detail that raises its own questions about how the encounter escalated from the very first moment of contact.

Official responses and the investigation

LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell issued a written statement after the shooting, acknowledging the weight of the loss while also noting the dangers officers face. His full statement read:

"The loss of a pet is deeply personal. For many, a dog is not simply an animal; it is a companion, a source of comfort, and a member of the family. LAPD officers face unknown dangers on a daily basis, but I expect them to exercise sound judgment, restraint, and respect for life whenever possible. That expectation is reflected in our training, policies, and specific guidance on encounters with dogs. All those factors will be carefully reviewed as part of this investigation."

McDonnell conducted a 72-hour review of the officers' actions, described as the first step in a lengthy internal investigation into shots being fired by an LAPD officer. Whether that review produced any preliminary findings has not been disclosed.

Mayor Karen Bass initially offered a public tribute to the dog, saying, "Every life lost to violence is a tragedy, and we know that the devastating loss of Jameson will be felt by his family forever." After viewing the bodycam footage on Friday night, Bass posted on social media calling the video "disturbing and tragic" and said she called for a city review of how Los Angeles prepares officers for such situations, saying written policies and procedures were "not enough."

That admission from the mayor is telling. If written policies are "not enough," then what has the city been doing since December 2023, when Directive No. 11 was issued? The document exists. The alternatives are listed. The lethal-force threshold is spelled out. The question is whether anyone ensured officers actually internalized it. The broader pattern of how Los Angeles handles the legal aftermath of officer-involved shootings only deepens that concern.

A long pattern in Los Angeles

This is not the first time LAPD officers have faced scrutiny for shooting dogs. Department statistics show 32 dog shootings since 2018, seven in 2018 alone, dropping to one in 2024. A 2005 Los Angeles Times investigation covering two decades of LAPD data found that one in four LAPD shootings targeted dogs. Over that period, police shot more than 465 dogs, killed at least 200, and wounded at least 140.

In 2013, Hawthorne police shot a dog four times after it jumped out of a vehicle as officers detained its owner. The owner pleaded with officers not to shoot. That video was viewed more than seven million times.

California, notably, does not mandate canine encounter training for police officers, unlike Texas and Colorado. A 2017 attempt to require such training failed in the state legislature. Nearly a decade later, the gap remains.

The family and the fallout

Jameson was the oldest of seven puppies in his litter, purchased two years ago by Marie Marseille. Vanessa Marseille described the bond between the dog and Marie's son, Jeremiah:

"Every time on FaceTime with Jeremiah, he's always walking the dog. When he takes my sister to work, Jameson is in the car, wagging his tongue."

Marie Marseille moved from New York to California for work in 2014. A GoFundMe set up for Marseille and her son has raised more than $200,000. The family has hired lawyers, who released a statement Friday condemning the police response shown in the video as "completely unnecessary and profoundly dangerous."

The officers involved have not been publicly named. Whether either has been placed on administrative leave or faces disciplinary action remains unknown. The full internal investigation is ongoing. And the bodycam footage, while it captures the shooting, has not been confirmed to cover the entirety of the officers' response.

Across the country, bodycam footage has increasingly become the definitive record in use-of-force cases, for better or worse. In this case, the footage does not appear to help the officers' position. What it shows is a dog moving toward an officer in a narrow passageway, and an officer who chose his firearm over every other option his own department's directive told him to consider first.

What accountability looks like

Conservatives who support law enforcement, and that includes most of this publication's readers, should be the first to demand that officers follow their own departments' rules. Backing the badge does not mean excusing every trigger pull. It means holding officers to the standards that make the badge worth backing.

LAPD Directive No. 11 exists for a reason. It lists voice commands, pepper spray, batons, TASERs, and physical deterrents. It warns about the danger of stray rounds near bystanders. It sets a lethal-force threshold of imminent death or serious bodily injury. The bodycam footage shows no evidence that any alternative was tried before four rounds were fired at a family pet, with the dog's owner standing nearby. Officers who represent the public well, and there are countless examples of officers performing with courage and sound judgment, deserve better than to have their profession's reputation undermined by incidents like this.

The investigation will determine whether these officers violated policy or law. But the footage is already public. And so is the LAPD's own directive. Anyone can read the rules, watch the video, and draw the obvious conclusion about whether the two match up.

When the department writes a policy that says "consider every alternative before you shoot," and the bodycam shows an officer who considered none of them, the policy isn't the problem. The failure is.