Harris County jury awards former Precinct 3 K-9 handler $1.7 million

A Harris County jury has ordered Precinct 3 to pay former K-9 handler Bert Whittington 3rd $1.65 million, a verdict that turns one man’s discrimination claim into a costly warning about discipline, supervision and accountability inside the constable’s office.

Whittington, who joined Harris County Precinct 3 in January 2017 after more than two decades in the Marine Corps, graduation from the state police academy and service as a state trooper, said he began noticing coworkers making disparaging remarks about Black people soon after he arrived. Four months into the job, he was assigned to the Crime Interdiction Unit as a police canine handler.

The federal case, filed in 2021 in the Southern District of Texas, grew into a detailed record of workplace conflict. In an unpublished July 7, 2025, opinion, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit said Whittington alleged that a clique of light-skinned coworkers excluded officers with darker skin, that employees made racist comments after George Floyd’s death and at a COVID-19 testing event, and that Black people were referred to with slurs and degrading language. He also alleged that supervisors left him without backup and pushed him into dangerous front-point positions during high-risk entries.

That court record also shows another side of the case: Whittington failed to wear a body-worn camera twice and mishandled evidence, and county records reflected disciplinary action tied to three dog-bite incidents he said were pretextual after he complained about discrimination. The jury ultimately found racial discrimination, but did not accept that he proved beyond a reasonable doubt that he was wrongfully terminated because of his race.

Whittington said the verdict felt like justice after years of conflict inside the office. He also said he hoped speaking up would help change the culture in Precinct 3, where Sherman Eagleton was the elected constable during Whittington’s employment and remains the county’s Precinct 3 constable today.

The county attorney’s office had not responded to questions after the verdict, leaving Harris County to confront the financial and political consequences. That matters in a county that approved a $2.8 billion fiscal 2026 budget after wrestling with a roughly $200 million shortfall, because this award will be paid by the public side of local government, not by a private employer.