Understood.

I'll chime in on this subject.
The dogs we obtain from Europe come from many situations. They range from people who are excellent traijners who enjoy seeing their dogs get applied in the service of a community as a police dog to people who visit the pound or answer want adds for dogs they can do 2 weeks of bitework on and sell to a vender to then broker into the US and every possible scenario in between.
The demand for working dogs in the US and abroad is insatiable right now.
The result is that if it can remotely be expected to function it gets an airplane ticket west.
Reasons for such behaviors range from simply rank out of control dogs to dogs with seizure disorders and symtoms that either are or similiar to intermittant range syndrome.
It is a remote possibility that the dog had a tumor, or simply is crazy.
The fact that it waited after some severe incidents may have revolved around a couple of issues.
first, the darn things are really expensive and try talking to your supervisor telling him hey, I want to euthanize the dog and not catch hell or even end up loosing your position in some departments.
Then consider that most of the time the dog works well, handles the stress of training and deployment and is normal. You have a dog whose performance is great except for a couple of episodes. Who wants to kill such an animal???
We all want to see a great dog given all the consideration possible. Because if law enforcement has to get rid of a dog that is eating up its handler then there is only one choice and that is to put the dog down. I know I will give the dog every possible chance I can if it is a functional and controllable police dog.
Putting a bullet in a dog you work your butt off with and you are finding success with is not something anyone would want to do, but neither is the green needle... the result is that in some rare occasions the decision has to be made out in the field after putting off the decision because it is just plain difficult to do.

Kevin,

I read your post and found it interesting. It raised a few questions for me.

Who decides where the dogs come from? Who gets to choose the dog? Is it the supervisor or the actual handler of that particular dog?

Hi Kevin, My friend a police Lady/handler.. i know it sound funny but yes she is female, had a mal who had the same issues.. Great working partner, but the dog had here and there a " shortage". She could not get rid of him because of this, but on the other hand this dog worked like crazy.. The dog ended up killing himself in his kennel. You 're right you never know what could cause issues like these. She called him "nuts, elevator not going all the way up and so on" but she still had used him for a while for work.

OK, this is not to comment on the incident, because I am horribly lacking in knowledge on that (and, as Ed says, a civilian has no idea about the stressors in active combat/police duty situations), but I would be interested to find out if the dog was maybe positive for Lymes disease. On a few veterinary websites that I've browsed around on, it says that sudden, unprovoked, "out of the blue", intermittent, crazy aggressivness can be caused by a dog being infected with Lymes disease. Or, anyhow, the veterinarians are beginning to believe that this is possible.

As kevin already stated, Some dogs are just wired wrong. Without knowing the handler personally, any guess of what happened is only conjecture. This could be something as complicated as neurological problems with the dog or as simple as a mis-matched team wherein the dog is stronger than the handler and as such there are some dominance problems. I personally knew two handlers with very stong willed Mals but the handlers were weak. Both handlers had lots of problems the whole time. Neither team lasted long and one of the handlers was put out of commission for 6 months when his dog chewed his hand up. It is not unusual for a team to work together for 2 years even if there are problems. Police administrators are in no hurry to spend the money to get a suitable dog to replace a potentially dangerous one.