A police dog bite is one of the few excessive force questions where the Eighth Circuit has built out its own body of doctrine rather than leaving lower courts to reason from general Fourth Amendment principles. That matters to a Minnesota plaintiff for two reasons. First, the rules are more specific than the balancing test in Graham v. Connor, and specificity is what defeats qualified immunity. Second, three of the circuit’s leading K-9 decisions arose in Minnesota — out of Minnetonka, out of Brooklyn Park and Crystal, and out of Hennepin County. A K-9 case filed in the District of Minnesota is governed in significant part by Minnesota-grown precedent.
This article walks through what the Eighth Circuit has actually held — and, where it has not held anything, says so.
A police dog is not deadly force
The threshold question in any force case is which constitutional standard applies. In Kuha v. City of Minnetonka, 365 F.3d 590 (8th Cir. 2004), a man who fled a Minnetonka traffic stop was tracked into a field by a dog trained to bite and hold. The dog bit him near the groin and severed his femoral artery. Even on those facts, the court declined to treat the dog as deadly force: “We find the likelihood of death from the use of a properly trained police dog to apprehend a suspect sufficiently remote as to preclude its characterization as deadly force.” It concluded that “review of excessive force claims involving police dogs is properly governed by the general standard established in Graham rather than the deadly force standard of Garner.”
So the framework from Tennessee v. Garner does not apply. The claim rises or falls on Graham’s objective reasonableness inquiry — “the severity of the crime at issue, whether the suspect poses an immediate threat to the safety of the officers or others, and whether he is actively resisting arrest or attempting to evade arrest by flight,” judged “from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight.” Graham v. Connor, 490 U.S. 386, 396 (1989).
Kuha also rejected the argument that using a bite-and-hold dog is itself unconstitutional: “the mere use of a police dog trained to bite and hold does not rise to the level of a constitutional violation.”
The warning rule is the heart of the case law
Kuha’s enduring holding is about what happens before the dog is released. The court held “that a jury could properly find it objectively unreasonable to use a police dog trained in the bite and hold method without first giving the suspect a warning and opportunity for peaceful surrender,” and observed that “the presence or absence of a warning is a critical fact in virtually every excessive force case involving a police dog.”
The court rejected the officer-safety rationale the district court had accepted: “We agree that officer safety is paramount but disagree that the district court properly decided as a matter of law that requiring a verbal warning will put officers at increased risk. To the contrary, such a practice would likely diminish the risk of confrontation by increasing the likelihood that a suspect will surrender.” It left room for exceptions — “While there may be exceptional cases where a warning is not feasible” — but framed them as the exception, not the rule.
Three later decisions define where that rule now stands.
The warning holding survived en banc review. In Szabla v. City of Brooklyn Park, 486 F.3d 385 (8th Cir. 2007) (en banc) — a case in which a Brooklyn Park dog bit a man sleeping in a park during a search for the driver of a crashed car, a man who had nothing to do with the crash — the full court took up only municipal liability. It expressly said: “we accept Kuha’s Fourth Amendment holding for purposes of analysis, and assume there is a submissible case that Officer Baker was required to give a warning before using his police dog to bite and hold.” What the en banc court did discard was Kuha’s municipal-liability analysis: “we abandon Part II.C of our opinion in Kuha as circuit precedent.” Later opinions therefore describe Kuha as abrogated or overruled “on other grounds” — the warning holding is not among those grounds.
By 2020 the warning rule was clearly established. In Adams v. City of Cedar Rapids, 74 F.4th 935 (8th Cir. 2023), a handler searching for burglary suspects gave no warning of his own; other officers had given four K-9 warnings in the search area, three of them over squad-car PA systems. The dog found a teenager under a trailer and bit his arm. Taking the facts in the plaintiff’s favor — he testified he heard nothing — the court affirmed the denial of qualified immunity: “Officer Trimble had fair notice from this court’s precedent that the failure to give a warning and an opportunity to surrender violated clearly established law.” Judge Grasz dissented, and his dissent marks the boundary of what Adams decides: in his view “it is not clearly established that a police officer using a canine must personally deliver the warning or that the officer must be able to verify the warning was in fact heard by the suspect.” The majority did not announce a personal-delivery requirement; it held that on this record the adequacy of the warnings was a jury question.
And the rule was applied again in 2026. In Cameron v. City of Des Moines, No. 24-3383 (8th Cir. Feb. 26, 2026), officers arresting a first-degree murder suspect released a dog with no warning as the suspect jumped from a roof and ran. The panel restated the rule — “Officers are generally required to issue a warning outside of ‘exceptional cases where a warning is not feasible’” — and reversed summary judgment on the failure-to-warn claim. Its reasoning on the officer-safety exception is worth quoting, because it is the argument defendants make in every one of these cases: “defendants have failed to explain why issuing a warning would have created safety risks. The fact that Cameron was dangerous does not necessarily mean that issuing a warning would have made him even more dangerous.” And on who decides: “Ordinarily, a jury is best suited to determine whether risks to officer safety justify foregoing the warning requirement, and only in rare circumstances are those risks ‘so obvious’ that they become a legal question.”
Duration of the bite, and failing to call the dog off
Here the law is thinner, and a plaintiff’s lawyer should say so rather than pretend otherwise.
In Kuha, the entire seizure — bite to release — lasted ten to fifteen seconds, during which the handler refused to call the dog off until Kuha let go of the dog’s head and raised his hands. The court found the claim “a closer question” but resolved it against the plaintiff: “In light of the short time frame at issue and the conditions under which Kuha fled and was found, we conclude that as a matter of law the officers’ actions after Kuha was bitten were not objectively unreasonable.”
Cameron reached the same result on a roughly fifteen-second bite, holding it reasonable to let the dog hold the suspect until he was handcuffed. Notably, the panel remarked that “Cameron cites only one case from our circuit discussing the reasonableness of a canine bite” — Kuha — and that it cut against him. The panel distinguished out-of-circuit decisions on duration: a bite of “one to two minutes” held unreasonable in the Fifth Circuit, and one lasting “a few minutes” in the Seventh, both involving suspects who were not resisting.
The honest summary: the Eighth Circuit has not established any duration threshold at which a continued bite becomes unreasonable. It has twice found roughly fifteen seconds reasonable on the facts before it, and we located no published Eighth Circuit decision holding a bite excessive because of its length — consistent with Cameron’s own observation that Kuha was the only case from the circuit the plaintiff could find discussing the reasonableness of a canine bite. That is a gap, not a rule, and it means a duration theory in this circuit is currently built on distinguishing Kuha and Cameron on their facts rather than on citing a holding.
Cameron also addressed how a dog is removed. The plaintiff argued it was unreasonable to pry the dog’s jaw open with a break stick rather than use a verbal release command. The court did not decide whether that was reasonable; it granted immunity because “Cameron fails to offer any case discussing reasonable canine removal techniques.” Removal technique is an open question in this circuit.
Was there even a seizure?
A Fourth Amendment excessive force claim requires a seizure, and with dogs that threshold is genuinely contested when the person bitten is not the intended target.
In Whitworth v. Kling, No. 22-3051 (8th Cir. Jan. 17, 2024), an off-duty K-9 playing fetch in his handler’s backyard charged a guest and bit her. The court affirmed summary judgment: “This incident bears all the hallmarks of accidental force,” and accidental force is not a seizure.
In Irish v. McNamara, No. 23-3034 (8th Cir. July 18, 2024) — a Hennepin County case — a deputy’s dog bit a fellow officer during a foot pursuit through a cemetery. The Eighth Circuit granted qualified immunity on the seizure question, holding “only that it was not clearly established as of March 2022 that an officer in Minnesota could seize a fellow officer with a K9 without subjectively intending to do so.” The opinion candidly acknowledges that the role of an officer’s subjective intent in the seizure analysis remains unsettled in this circuit even after Torres v. Madrid.
By contrast, Irish describes the earlier Szabla panel decision, 429 F.3d 1168 (8th Cir. 2005), as having found “a submissible case of excessive force” where a tracking dog bit a bystander — a case Irish places in the mistaken-identity line, because the handler ordered the man he had found to show his hands and held him until officers confirmed he was not the suspect. Irish draws the line this way: mistaken-identity cases find seizures; unintended-target cases do not.
The qualified immunity overlay, which is where these cases end
Every one of these decisions turns on clearly established law, and the pattern is instructive. Kuha announced the warning rule and then granted the officers immunity — “Kuha’s right to a verbal warning in this case was not clearly established at the time of the seizure.” Adams denied immunity on the warning claim because Kuha had by then supplied fair notice. Cameron split: immunity denied on the failure to warn, granted on bite duration and removal technique. Irish granted immunity outright at the seizure threshold.
The practical lesson is that in this circuit the failure-to-warn theory is the one supported by squarely governing precedent. Everything else about a dog deployment — duration, removal method, the seizure question for a non-target — sits in territory where a defendant can credibly argue no case put the question beyond debate.
Qualified immunity also shapes the claim against the city. The en banc court in Szabla held that “a municipal policymaker cannot exhibit fault rising to the level of deliberate indifference to a constitutional right when that right has not yet been clearly established,” and Cameron applied that to reject a failure-to-train claim. A facially lawful K-9 policy that is simply silent on warnings does not itself create liability; the plaintiff needs deliberate indifference, which ordinarily means notice of a pattern. See Monell and municipal liability.
The Minnesota state-law claims
Kuha also brought negligence, assault, and battery claims under Minnesota law, and lost them — on official immunity. Applying the doctrine that a public official performing duties calling for “judgment or discretion is not personally liable to an individual for damages unless he is guilty of a willful or malicious wrong” (quoting Elwood v. Rice County, 423 N.W.2d 671 (Minn. 1988)), the court held that “once the discretionary decision is made to use a dog to assist in an apprehension, the dog’s handler must continuously assess the evolving situation and make operational discretionary decisions—e.g., how to instruct the K-9, when to give a verbal warning, whether and when to let the dog off its leash, etc.” Those were discretionary acts, the officers were immune, and vicarious official immunity extended that protection to the City.
That holding is a significant obstacle to the Minnesota tort route in a K-9 case, and it is one reason these cases are litigated primarily under § 1983. Minnesota’s dog-bite statute, Minn. Stat. § 347.22, makes a dog’s owner liable “to the full amount of the injury sustained” when a dog “without provocation, attacks or injures any person who is acting peaceably in any place where the person may lawfully be” — but we located no Eighth Circuit or Minnesota appellate decision applying that statute to a law enforcement K-9 deployment, and Kuha did not address it. The general framework is covered in our articles on Minnesota’s dog-bite statute and on state-law claims against police alongside § 1983.
What to preserve early
Because the warning question is where the Eighth Circuit’s decisions have turned, the record made in the first days matters. Squad and body-camera audio establishes whether a warning was given, how loud, from where, and whether it could be heard from the bitten person’s position — the precise dispute in Adams. Dispatch logs fix the timeline. The agency’s own K-9 directive matters: in Adams, Cedar Rapids policy required a verbal warning before releasing the dog, and in Kuha, the department’s directive addressed warnings only for building searches. Where video exists, bite duration is measurable to the second, which is the only way to engage Kuha and Cameron on their own terms.
Talk to us
Madgett Law, LLC handles civil rights and police misconduct cases in Minnesota state and federal court, alongside the firm’s personal injury and general litigation practice. If you or a family member were bitten by a police dog, the case can turn on facts — warnings, timing, video — that are easiest to secure early. To discuss a possible claim, call 612-470-6529 or send us a message.
Sources: Kuha v. City of Minnetonka, 365 F.3d 590 (8th Cir. 2004) (amended opinion filed April 27, 2004, superseding the opinion filed May 8, 2003), Part II.A (police dog not deadly force; Graham rather than Garner standard; bite-and-hold not per se unconstitutional; warning and opportunity for peaceful surrender; “exceptional cases where a warning is not feasible”; ten-to- fifteen-second hold not objectively unreasonable as a matter of law), Part II.B (verbal-warning right not clearly established as of September 1999), Part II.D (Minnesota official immunity and vicarious official immunity, quoting Elwood v. Rice County, 423 N.W.2d 671, 677 (Minn. 1988)) — official slip opinion, No. 02-1081. Szabla v. City of Brooklyn Park, 486 F.3d 385 (8th Cir. 2007) (en banc) (accepting Kuha’s Fourth Amendment holding for purposes of analysis; abandoning Part II.C of Kuha as circuit precedent; deliberate indifference cannot rest on a right not yet clearly established). Adams v. City of Cedar Rapids, 74 F.4th 935 (8th Cir. 2023), No. 22-3234 (fair notice from Kuha that failure to give a warning and opportunity to surrender violated clearly established law as of August 2020; adequacy of other officers’ warnings a jury question; Grasz, J., dissenting, on the limits of that holding). Cameron v. City of Des Moines, No. 24-3383 (8th Cir. Feb. 26, 2026) (warning requirement clearly established; officer-safety exception ordinarily a jury question; roughly fifteen-second hold until handcuffing reasonable; no clearly established law on canine removal technique; failure-to-train claim rejected under Szabla). Irish v. McNamara, No. 23-3034 (8th Cir. July 18, 2024) (not clearly established as of March 2022 that an officer in Minnesota could seize a fellow officer with a K-9 without subjectively intending to do so; mistaken-identity versus unintended-target lines of cases). Whitworth v. Kling, No. 22-3051 (8th Cir. Jan. 17, 2024) (off-duty K-9’s spontaneous bite was accidental force, not a seizure). Szabla v. City of Brooklyn Park, 429 F.3d 1168 (8th Cir. 2005) (panel), as described in Irish (submissible excessive force claim where dog bit a bystander initially believed to be the suspect). Graham v. Connor, 490 U.S. 386, 396 (1989) (reasonableness factors; perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene). Minn. Stat. § 347.22 (owner liability for dog attacks), text retrieved from the Minnesota Office of the Revisor of Statutes.
This article is general information about Minnesota and federal law. It is not legal advice, it does not create an attorney–client relationship, and it does not promise or imply any particular outcome. Every case depends on its own facts.