Dakota's Law Would Give Retired Police Dogs a Pension

A Massachusetts bill filed in January 2025 would create a state fund to cover medical and trauma care for retired police dogs. It’s called Dakota’s Law, and the name isn’t arbitrary.

Newton Police K-9 Dakota was a German shepherd mix who worked the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing aftermath. He helped lock down downtown and ran the pursuit of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev through the streets of Watertown. He came home a different dog. Fearful, withdrawn, unable to perform the work he’d been trained for, Dakota developed canine post-traumatic stress disorder. There wasn’t a diagnosis for it yet. There wasn’t a treatment plan. Euthanasia was being discussed.

James LaMonte wouldn’t let that happen. He pulled Dakota into his facility and built a rehabilitation program around him from nothing. That program survived, expanded, and became the K9 PTSD Research Center in Seekonk, a nonprofit that now treats retired military and law-enforcement dogs carrying trauma from their service years. Dakota’s story got its own film, the 2023 documentary Healing Dakota, which is streaming now on Amazon Prime.

Thirteen years on from those bombings, Boston’s gearing up for another marathon, and Dakota’s name has reached the State House.

State Representative Steven Xiarhos filed Dakota’s Law in January 2025 with co-sponsors attached. The bill would set up a state-managed fund, run through a committee and paid out through grants, to help cover the vet bills and trauma treatment that retired police K-9s need and don’t have guaranteed access to. It’s cleared committee in back-to-back sessions, which don’t happen often. Most bills can’t say that. Xiarhos also pushed through Nero’s Law in 2022, the measure that lets EMTs treat and transport injured police K-9s. He’s been building this thing piece by piece. “I was so impacted by James’s care of these dogs,” Xiarhos said.

LaMonte runs his operation on donations. No state contracts, no line items, no safety net. He houses these dogs, often for the rest of their lives, and he’s done it while watching his bank account like it might disappear. “Too many nights I went to sleep carrying a quiet fear and a heavy weight on my heart,” LaMonte told reporters, “the worry of not knowing if I would have the money if something serious happened, if an unexpected surgery or medical emergency put their life on the line.”

He’s got a clear read on what Dakota’s Law means practically. “Dakota’s Law would change everything. It would mean their care is no longer uncertain. It would mean their future is protected.”

Working dogs don’t collect pensions. They sniff out explosives in crowded places, run down suspects in the dark, and absorb that stress year after year without a retirement package waiting on the other side. The American Veterinary Medical Association has been pushing for more formal recognition of behavioral trauma in working animals. Researchers studying canine cognition have made the same case. The science has moved. The policy hasn’t kept pace.

A 2026 piece in Boston Magazine detailed the stakes around the bill as the marathon approached, pulling together LaMonte’s story and the legislative timeline. The bill’s still moving. Dakota’s still the reason it exists.