Jayden Abraham suffered severe injuries to his face, neck and arm when he was taken down by police dog Maverick in St James, in the city’s southern suburbs, on Sunday night.
The 13-year-old told 9News, “They let the dog out on me”, saying he was telling police to get the dog off him but they didn’t.
“I remember the dog was biting me,” he said, lying back on a hospital bed with a bandaged right arm draped over a pillow and a big cut running from his left eye down his cheek.
WA Police defended the arrest, saying bodycam footage supported the officers, who were responding to a spate of calls about break-ins and people being threatened on Holder Street.
Jayden was one of three children arrested alongside a 21-year-old man, who is the only person to have been charged.
Indigenous leader Mervyn Eades described Jayden’s injuries as “horrific”.
“We say it’s malicious and we say it’s criminal,” he said, standing alongside Jayden’s father on Wednesday.
“… The dog handler, we demand that they be charged.”
Eades said for many Aboriginal children, “the automatic reaction is to run” on seeing police but that Jayden had stopped before the dog was released.
“That’s just the way it is, so they ran and Jayden actually stopped, he didn’t want to run no more, and then he stopped, police apprehended him,” he said.
“No charges have been laid against this child, he was not in the act of committing any crime or anything like that, so why did they do it? The big question is why.
“There is no logical reasoning to set a dog upon a 13-year-old child.”
Police are refusing the family’s calls to release the bodycam vision of the teenager being mauled because of its confronting nature and the ongoing investigation.
They allowed reporters to view 24 seconds of footage showing the dog and handler chasing down the child, commanding the animal to latch on.
The child’s arm is mauled for three seconds before the vision cuts to black.
Police said that was when Jayden was released, but it was not shown in the vision.
The vision does show the child was not handcuffed during the arrest, as stated by his family.
WA Police Deputy Commissioner Kylie Whiteley said the force would review the incident, but defended the police dog’s deployment to the scene.
“In the middle of the night, in the dark, it’s unknown who you are chasing, so in those circumstances a police dog may be deployed, and in this instance it was a 13-year-old and others,” she said.
“It was appropriate the dog was deployed to the incident. They’re the sorts of incidents we would expect a canine unit to attend to.”
Whitely rejected Eades’ allegation that an officer kicked the boy in the face.
“The injuries sustained by the juvenile are consequent of the police dog,” she said.
Maverick is temporarily out of service while the matter is investigated.
