San Ramon cops released dog to badly maul Uber driver who’d missed rental payment

In that moment, captured on dashboard and body-camera videos obtained by The Chronicle, Badr was unarmed, barefoot and not resisting, but was suffering grievous and permanent injuries.

Badr, who had rented the car through a company serving gig workers, was treated as a potential car thief one day in December 2020 and then violently attacked by police despite posing no apparent threat. He said the car’s owner had reported the vehicle stolen after he was late making payments.

The videos raise questions about officers’ use of force and handling of dogs, as well as practices by car rental companies and police agencies that can turn routine stops into tense and dangerous interactions.

The videos are evidence in a federal lawsuit Badr filed last month against the city of San Ramon, its police chief, K-9 handler John Cattolico and six other officers. The allegations include excessive force, assault and battery, and violation of civil rights. Badr said he believes he was treated differently because he is North African and was perceived to be Muslim.

Badr, alleging negligence, is also suing the car’s owner, CarMommy CEO and co-founder John Blomeke, his San Jose company, and HyreCar Inc. of Los Angeles, which acted as a go-between for the rental.

“The beginning of the process is this calling in of a stolen car that everybody knew wasn’t stolen,” Matthew Haley, Badr’s attorney, said in an interview.

Footage of the mauling “just speaks for itself,” he said. “It was absolutely, positively uncalled for. This is the nicest guy you will ever meet in your life. Hardworking Uber driver in the middle of the pandemic just trying to make ends meet, and this is what befalls him. It’s stunning. It’s hard to watch that video.”

Emails to HyreCar, Cattolico and San Ramon’s city attorney requesting comment were not returned, nor were email, phone and text messages to CarMommy and Blomeke.

San Ramon Police Chief Craig Stevens said in an email that his department conducted an internal investigation into the arrest of Badr, but he declined to answer other questions.

“The San Ramon PD does a Use of Force review on all cases where any force was used, in order to ensure that it aligns with policy,” the chief said. “As this incident is the subject of civil litigation, that is all the information I can give you at this time.”

Stevens said his department had no canine deployments that resulted in a bite in 2021, and a total of five over the past five years.

More than a year later, it’s unclear whether any of the officers involved in the December 2020 stop were disciplined. Though Badr had to be rushed to a hospital by ambulance for surgery and spent the night there, Badr said neither San Ramon police nor the Contra Costa County District Attorney’s Office contacted him after the incident to ask about the dog attack.

Instead, San Ramon police recommended that the District Attorney’s Office charge Badr with felony vehicle theft and a misdemeanor count of resisting arrest, despite the videos showing he did not resist.

The District Attorney’s Office declined to file charges against Badr in March, a spokesperson said, because of “lack of sufficient evidence and interest of justice.”

Badr, who is 42 and lives in Oakland, was a social worker in Egypt before he came to America in 2009, alone with no family. He drove for Uber and Lyft, and when the pandemic hit and fares disappeared, he started delivering food for DoorDash.

Badr said he had to relinquish his own car because the pandemic curtailed his income and he could no longer make payments. That’s when he discovered the vehicle rental industry that serves ride-hail and delivery drivers.

Through HyreCar, Badr entered a four-month rental agreement in August 2020 for a gray 2017 Toyota Camry owned by startup CarMommy and registered to Blomeke, according to the lawsuit.

“Our mission is to supply the gig economy driver with options to help them to Rent or Buy a car to use for work within the RideShare industry!” CarMommy says on its website.

As the contract neared an end, Badr told The Chronicle, he fell behind on his payments by a couple of days, but communicated with the company that he would pay them shortly, as he had done in the past. “I had been paying everything on time,” he said.

Haley, his attorney, said he learned from investigation records that Blomeke had reported the car stolen to the San Jose Police Department, prompting the license plate number to be listed in a state Department of Justice database shared among agencies. Haley said the rental contract included language allowing the car to be reported stolen if payments were late and if other criteria were met.

San Jose police declined to comment on the stolen vehicle report, citing the litigation.

Theft is a chronic problem for rental car companies, but police involvement in recovering the vehicles has raised controversy. CBS News reported in November that dozens of Hertz customers alleged they were falsely arrested — at least one at gunpoint — after cars they had legitimately leased were reported as stolen.

In a bid to help the car rental industry, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill in 2019 that shortened the time, from five days to 72 hours, that a rental company must wait to report a vehicle as stolen if the lease has expired.

Supporters of the law said thefts of rental cars were skyrocketing, and thieves were hurrying to use the vehicles in other crimes or strip them for parts. But the California Public Defenders Association warned that the reduced time window “exponentially increases the risk that honest consumers will be subject to dangerous interactions with police officers now required to act as repo-men for the car rental industry.”

The new law requires an owner to make “a reasonable number of attempts” to inform a customer that the car will be reported stolen if not returned. Badr alleges in his lawsuit that he never received such a warning.

San Francisco State University criminal justice lecturer Jim Dudley, a retired 32-year veteran of the San Francisco Police Department, said companies can report a vehicle as embezzled rather than stolen if payments are delayed and there had been a legitimate contract between the parties.

“Otherwise officers might think it’s from a carjacking or another situation involving violence,” Dudley said.

On Dec. 20, 2020, Badr was driving to his part-time job at a San Ramon gas station when one of the city’s 40 license plate readers pinged as he drove by, Haley said, alerting police in real time to a reportedly stolen vehicle.

Last year, San Ramon followed local and national trends in police surveillance when it spent $1.2 million on the plate readers as well as 42 fixed cameras, with the system covering “every route of ingress/egress as well as areas surrounding commercial areas,” according to city records.

At about 6:40 p.m., officers in a half dozen police vehicles pulled Badr over near the intersection of San Ramon Valley Boulevard and Crow Canyon Road. The lawsuit alleges there was no indication Badr was armed, posed a threat or had committed a violent crime.

Badr made no attempt to flee, according to his suit, and complied with officers’ instructions to show his hands through his window. In the videos obtained by The Chronicle, the officers — with guns drawn and the police dog barking — ordered Badr out of the car as they took cover behind their vehicles.

The barefoot Badr stepped out of the car, dropped his shoes onto the pavement and stood next to them, the videos show.

“All of them are talking to me at one time,” Badr recalled. “They’re yelling at me, and all of them have guns out. I did what they say exactly.”

With the car surrounded, officers yelled at Badr to put his hands in the air and not to reach back into the vehicle. The videos show that Badr placed his hands on the roof of the car, then briefly dropped them near his waist as he shuffled his feet, trying to slip his shoes on.

As Badr placed one hand back on the car, Officer Cattolico, the dog handler, moved toward the car’s rear bumper, a few feet from the driver, and released Dexter, a German shepherd and Belgian Malinois mix trained as a patrol K-9 and detector of narcotics. Only about 10 seconds had passed since Badr stepped out of the Toyota.

The dog immediately bit into and gripped Badr’s right arm, causing him to shriek in pain. “I never do nothing,” Badr yelled to the officers. “I never in my life do anything.”

Dexter bit Badr for a more than a minute, the videos show, before an officer appeared to use some type of device to get the dog to release. The team of officers then handcuffed Badr.

“He did everything he was told to do in circumstances where he’s getting conflicting instructions and there was never any hint of a weapon. There was never any shiny object. There was never anything,” Haley said. “If anything, he was trying to put on his shoes.”

San Ramon’s police policy manual states that a dog can be deployed if “the canine handler reasonably believes that the individual has either committed, is committing or threatening to commit any serious offense” and one other condition exists — either the suspect poses an imminent violent threat, is resisting arrest, or is concealed in a location where entry poses a threat to an officer or the public.

Deploying a police dog for a lesser criminal offense requires approval from a commander. An officer must make a clearly audible warning before releasing a dog, allowing a suspect reasonable time to surrender, unless that would increase the risk of injury or escape. In Badr’s case, no warning is heard on the videos.

According to department policy, when a dog deployment results in a bite or injury a supervisor must be notified. The injuries must be documented in both a canine use report and the arrest report.

Like other police agencies, the San Ramon force does not publicly report dog bites, and officials did not respond to detailed questions about how those cases are investigated internally.

A study published in 2019 in the Journal of Forensic and Legal Medicine found that, from 2005 to 2013, roughly 3,700 people a year were treated in emergency rooms for police dog injuries; 95% of them were male, and Black people were disparately bitten.

A 2020 investigation by the Marshall Project found that police dogs were frequently turned loose on people who were not violent and were suspected of either a minor crime or no crime at all. Officers were rarely held accountable for misconduct, victims were rarely compensated, and police in numerous instances struggled to pull K-9s off people.

A Bay Area News Group investigation published in December found that in Richmond, 73 of 122 use-of-force incidents causing significant injury during a recent six-year period involved dog bites.

After Dexter was pulled from Badr in San Ramon, the driver lay his stomach, handcuffed and bleeding. One officer, straddling his back, wiped an unknown substance off his hands and onto Badr’s back, according to the lawsuit and video.

The footage of the police stop shocked Haley when he first watched it. “It’s the screaming. It’s Ali screaming as the dog is chewing his arm off,” he said. “It’s just a jarring thing to watch.”

Badr said he was taken by ambulance to a hospital, where he was handcuffed to a bed and wheeled into surgery on his mangled arm. It would be the first of three surgeries, with another one scheduled in the future, he said.

Badr woke up the next morning with 32 stitches closing a long tear in his forearm and an additional 16 on another laceration. The handcuffs were gone, he said, and the officers had left the hospital room. All that remained was a notice to appear in court.

When Badr appeared on the designated date at the Contra Costa County Superior Court in Martinez, he said the clerk told him there was no case under his name. No one had notified him there were no charges to answer to, and he never heard from police again, he said.

In his lawsuit, Badr alleges “extensive and permanent damage to his arm and hand” causing “significant scarring.” He said he has trouble sleeping, sees a therapist and takes medication because of the trauma of his experience. His scars remain visible, particularly a large bump on his upper forearm and a twisted finger.

“It’s not going to be normal like before,” he said.

Matthias Gafni is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email:

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