Alex Busansky was a member of the Justice Department's civil rights division team that helped prosecute K-9 officer Stephanie Mohr in 2001. Trump pardoned her this month.
Busansky wrote about what Mohr did in a Washington Post opinion piece:
In the middle of the night on Sept. 21, 1995, a local Prince George's County police burglary stakeout unit found two homeless men on the empty roof of a business, eating food they had found in the trash in Takoma Park, Md. Ordered down from the roof, Ricardo Mendez and his friend willingly climbed down. Lit by a police helicopter above and facing a brick wall, the two men were surrounded by police officers, some with guns drawn, and Mohr holding her German shepherd on a leash. Both men obeyed commands and stood facing the wall with their hands up.
It should have been over. It wasn't.
A police sergeant later testified that he was approached by Mohr's supervising officer who said, "Hey Sarge, we got a new dog. Mind if it gets a bite?" The sergeant gave consent, and Mohr set her dog to attack Mendez, an undocumented immigrant whose only crime was seeking a safe place to eat and sleep. Mohr testified that she was doing her job as trained, and the victim needed "only 10 stitches."
When Mohr was pardoned after 10 years in prison, she said, "It's a pinch-yourself moment. I'm thrilled, I'm humbly grateful. I'm not surprised. President Trump has been, of all the modern presidents, one of the greatest supporters of law enforcement. He has said early on that he was always looking for cases where the Department of Justice may have overstepped or overreached."
Also from Washington Post:
This was no accident or split-second mistake. It was a willful and deliberate act of police brutality. It was also not Mohr's first — and there was a pattern to the violence. Evidence at trial showed that Mohr had previously released her dog on a Black teenager sleeping in a hammock in his own backyard. She had threatened the relatives of a fugitive that she would let her dog attack their "black ass" if they did not tell her where he was. There were other incidents that the jury did not even learn about, including one in which Mohr put her dog into a trash dumpster to attack a man who had fled from police.
