When someone sees a German Shepherd Dog or a Belgian Malinois, one of the most commonly asked first questions is: “Is that a police dog?”
A number of breeds are used for police work, with German Shepherd Dogs, Belgian Malinois and crosses between the two breeds the most popular. But for other types of police work, breeds like Labrador Retrievers are used for work that doesn’t involve apprehension.
There have been plenty of movies made about police dogs and what they are, but the reality of life as a dog and officer team is much different.
For Carrollton Police Department’s Corporal Kane Moore, a day in the life of a police K9 includes just about every day of his life. Moore is paired with a Belgian Malinois named Olivia, who can best be described as a “switch.”
She’s one of the most even-keeled police dogs you’ll ever meet, but she knows how to turn it on with the snap of a finger when it comes to doing her job.
Moore and Olivia came together after he had already been an officer, just not a K9 officer. Contrary to popular belief, not all officers originally go into the profession set on being a dog handler. There are some who do, but others practically happen upon the job, along with those who develop an interest and affinity for it during their career.
When Moore, who grew up with hunting dogs, decided he wanted to be a dog handler, there were only two dogs in the department in Carrollton, Georgia. They told him that he wouldn’t be getting a dog any time soon, but he maintained a proactive approach that he says he would recommend to anyone looking to get into the field.
And even when he got his first police dog, he admits that he was “a little intimidated” after not having owned what officers refer to as “the pointy-eared dogs.”
“I was going to the K9 training days, hanging out, helping out when I could,” Moore says. “I kept training with them and showed my interest. Then, out of nowhere, AKC Reunite gave us a grant.” He used the grant to go to K9 School, and off he and Olivia went.
Officer Chandler Carroll had a bit of a different experience, leaping at the opportunity to join Carrollton PD for the opportunity to become a K9 handler.
“I worked at a different department and I had always wanted to be a K9 handler,” Carroll reports. “And so, I saw that Carrollton had posted on their Facebook page that they were looking for someone to be a handler for Jack. I applied, got hired, and went straight in with (police dog) Jack after graduating FTO.”
All of this is not as simple as it sounds, though.
Carrollton Police Department’s process is similar to that of many other police departments, though things do differ from place to place. The officer has an interview, puts in a letter of recommendation from a supervisor, and then there is a tryout day that consists of a physical event and a panel interview. The physical event is about a one-mile run on different types of terrain that simulates a track. There is also an obstacle course in which the officer must carry a 50-pound bag that simulates a downed K9.
The officer is then interviewed by the K9 supplier (which is Arete K9 for Carrollton PD, specifically) which matches the officer with a dog they believe best fits them. There is a one-month bonding period and then the officer goes with the dog to a K9 school for 12-13 weeks.
K9 school is full of new adventures and surprises, where officers truly learn about themselves, their dogs, and how they sync up. For officers like Carrollton PD’s Hannah Puckett, there are moments they specifically won’t forget either.
“In K9 school, I got grabbed on the back of my neck at first by a dog who was going for my ponytail,” Puckett shares. “Luckily, he only scraped his canine teeth and I had just a couple of scratches. He grabbed me by my ponytail and dragged me out by my hair. He was doing his job, though.”
The bonding period further proves the pairing process, as officers are usually paired with K9 partners with similar personalities to theirs. For others, it just happens that way.
“Me and Kefla are very similar, even though she didn’t get paired directly with me, she ended up being just like me in dog form,”
Puckett laughs.
Upon graduation from K9 school, training is continued on a repetitious, reward-motivated basis, just like training any other dog for anything else.
A lot of the smaller cities will join together to train dogs. At Carrollton PD they have what is called an “open door policy” when it comes to departments helping, working with, and learning from
one another.
Every Friday, the units meet up in an area located practically behind the University of West Georgia football stadium, where they simulate a number of events. One of the most well-known of these is bitework, which actually isn’t what some people may think it is, according to Puckett.
“It’s definitely a little intimidating the first time that you do it.” Puckett explains. “Even now, I still get an adrenaline rush when I can hear the dog coming and I know that he’s about to bite me,” she says. “You might feel a little pressure or get a little bruised after, but for the most part it doesn’t really hurt.”
But the training is more than bitework. While that is a major component, police dogs have many jobs outside of the aggressive apprehension scenes like in the movies where the “bad guy” is taken down by a “meat eater” of an animal.
The scenarios and “drills” include a burglary in progress, muzzle fighting, putting on the bite suit… things like that. In addition to training together, several cities in Georgia will offer a dog as mutual aid if needed, especially for departments that may not have a dog at all.
Specific to the Carollton, Georgia, area and many other communities around the county, one of the biggest things is tracking and alerting to drugs. That’s something that is personally important to Moore, and having a dog like Olivia has helped him fulfill a personal mission of his.
“I’m a big narcotics guy on the K9 Unit,” Moore asserts. “I’m huge about that because it has affected me firsthand, my family members, so I’m very passionate about drugs and getting them off the street. And when I tell people I want them to get clean, I really mean it.”
Moore remembers one of his and Olivia’s biggest tracks and drug busts, which came early on in his career, almost like it was yesterday. It took place in a swamp in 40-degree temperatures in what is still one of the biggest tracks of Olivia’s career.
“I find an Air Force One shoe that I know doesn’t belong out there and is definitely the suspect’s,” Moore remembers. “We keep going and I see the mud is sinking up to my knees.” Olivia, who is much lighter as a lean Malinois, did not sink, something that proved crucial to finally apprehending the suspect.
“Then I see the other shoe and know that we are on him, one-hundred percent going to catch him,” Moore continues. “We get to a creek and it was about 25 feet wide with a strong current. I could tell that Olivia lost the scent and so we doubled back.”
The officer who was with Moore at the time panned his flashlight and saw the suspect submerged in the water in such a way that all that could really be seen of the person was their eyes and nose.
He told Olivia to watch the suspect as he came out of the water and didn’t put up a fight. The command “watch” is a popular one when officers are in the process of what should be the suspect surrendering.
“Their ears are like sites on a gun,” Moore notes. “You can grab the dog and basically point them and tell them to watch the person. You can tell when they’re on target. They’ll perk their ears up and you know they know where the suspect is.”
But after Olivia performed her “watch” duty on that day, it was still far from over.
“She comes up to the car and she’s just lunging at the car, barking, and I thought she was just excited,” Moore explains. “I’m excited, too, just being a young handler. But she keeps alerting on the car, freaking out.”
Sure enough, Olivia had alerted to something big in the stolen car—a shotgun and a pound of methamphetamine.
Olivia’s successful track is an even bigger accomplishment than some may realize. It’s common for dogs to be shown a piece of a sock or another article of clothing to get the scent of a suspect, and then a few scenes later, they magically apprehend him. In real police work, however, scent tracking is so much harder than it appears at first glance.
Moore describes a typical scenario. “You’ve got all of the contaminants in the woods,” he says. “Two or three cops may chase a person and not catch him, so at that point, you’ve got three or four odors in the woods. It’s not like the dog can just determine which scent is the bad guy. Any successful track is incredibly memorable.”
When it comes to tracking, one of the biggest elements is pure trust in the dog, because the animal has a sense of smell and a responsibility that no human being could possibly possess. And even for experienced officers like Corporal William Awalt, who has served as a mentor figure to several Carrollton PD officers, there have been multiple moments of amazement.
Awalt recalls one of those clearly.
“My second dog I have now, when we found our first guy on a track for the county, I had no faith that we were going to get it done,” Awalt shares. “It was a moment to learn to really trust your dog.”
His dog led him under a road through a culvert that was about six feet tall on the other side of the creek.
“I thought in my head at the time, ‘There’s no way that guy came through here,’” he says. “But I kept following the dog, and eventually, he led me straight to the guy who surrendered. That was our first find of a person.”
That scenario, though, is far from the only time these dogs have left an impression on their handlers with how truly unique they are.
Corporal Zach Gossage of Carroll County Sheriff’s Office, which is located not far from Carrollton PD, says he had a particularly intriguing experience with one of his dogs in what, so far for him, has been 13 years as a K9 handler.
In Gossage’s role with criminal interdiction on the interstate, he comes into contact with a lot of drug mules who smuggle drugs across the country. For a job like that, he says that having a K9 was almost a necessity and is something he instantly fell in love with.
“I just remember running a dog around a car, and having him go completely underneath the car, Gossage recalls. “He was trying to sit down, because he was alerting to narcotic odor that had fallen. There was a duffel bag of methamphetamine that was laying in the backseat of a pickup truck and the odor was falling. Of all places for the dog to be able to get to… I just remember the dog going under the truck and sticking his nose up.”
The general public often views police dogs as something like robots that are perfect at what they do every single time. While these dogs are highly valued, and very well trained, they are still dogs, just like any other.
Carroll, and just about every other K9 officer, will tell you that the dog is “like a baby” when it first comes to them and that the process is much like caring for a child.
“You take small steps,” Carroll explains. “For example, when you get started with tracking you do 10 yards on walking in a straight line, spraying what is called ‘foot juice’ on the ground. Once they get good at that, you increase the range, start adding turns and so on and
so forth.”
Even the most-trained of dogs will have their “on days” and “off days.” But there are ways for officers to remedy and control the behavior, something that’s important to the job.
Gossage explains, “Most dogs are toy-driven or treat-driven. If my dog is having a bad day and doesn’t want to listen to what I say, all I have to do is pull out a toy and tuck it up under my arm to where he can’t get it, and I just walk around. The dog knows that if I do what I am supposed to do, even just for a little while, I will get my toy.”
One of the biggest questions surrounding police dogs is simply what happens when they hang up their bulletproof vests for the last time. There’s a false narrative that goes around sometimes that these dogs are not fit for normal home life, which could not be further from the truth.
And, according to Carroll, it is extremely rare for a dog to not be able to live a normal life as a pet in retirement.
“We get the option, at the end of their career, if we want to own them,” Carroll says. “The way that works is that we go to the police chief, the dog is retired, and there will be a contract drawn up and we will buy the dog for one dollar. The dog comes to live with us for the rest of their life at that point.”
This retirement period comes at different stages for different dogs. It is also a matter of preference from agency to agency. For some, it is a set age. For others, it is at the first signs of deficiency in performance.
“[Some agencies will] set the limit of 8, 9, 10 years old, the dog has to retire, no questions asked,” Gossage shares. “My dog right now is almost 11 years old… she does the job identical to the way that she did it at two years old when I was paired up with her… if I worked a department that retired the dogs at nine years old, what would she have been doing for the past two years?”
There is a common saying among Conformation dog show people: “Not every pet is a show dog, but every show dog is a pet.”
The same principle applies for police K9s too.
