Keeping a Blue Light On by Stacey Sanner

The K9 Unit is a specialty unit.  We have ten generalist teams, three narcotics teams and one bomb team.  The team includes the handler and the dog.  My dog, Moose, is what we call a generalist.  Generalist dogs search for humans and the human scent.

Moose is the property of the city of Seattle and I’m entrusted with him.  He lives with me now and that’s part of the bonding process that is absolutely essential for good team chemistry.  When he retires, I purchase him from the city.  When you work with a dog for ten years, you get attached to him.  He’s part of my family.

We respond to most felonies and some misdemeanors.  We always go to very intense calls and they are usually in-progress calls.  When a crime occurs and the suspect flees the scene, we come out there with the dog and we attempt to establish a track from where the suspect was.

As long as we have a clear uncontaminated starting point, the dog is going to figure out who we’re looking for.  That’s part of the training.  He has to be able to discriminate between the scents of other people who have walked across it and the scent that we’re looking for.

The intent is to use the dog to find the person and get them to give up.  But when they’re hiding, we don’t have the time to wait, so the dog will go in and grab a hold and pull them out.  They are trained to grab a hold of an arm because when the suspect is hiding, we can’t see their hands and we have no way of knowing if they’re holding a weapon.

The rewards are the times that we’ve been able to catch people using the dog when normally the suspect wouldn’t have been caught.