Dogged pursuit

Jace Radke

Monday, April 10, 2000 | 10:53 a.m.

Police officers partnering up is common -- but tripling up?

That's the idea behind a new program that will have at least one Metro Police unit patrolling the streets in teams of three.

Metro's K-9 unit is in the process of adding new dogs and handlers to its ranks as part of K-9 2000, a program that the unit's officers came up with that will partner 15 officers with both a patrol dog and either a narcotic or bomb dog.

"This is the only police department that I know of that is going to this system," unit Lt. Tom Smitley said. "Basically this will double the usefulness of a K-9 unit at a crime scene."

Three handlers and 11 dogs will be added to the K-9 unit that currently operates with 12 handlers and 19 dogs. The hope is that the added numbers will help the unit meet the demands of Clark County's growth, Sgt. Jay Carlson said.

"This will cut down on the workload, the overtime, and increase our coverage," Carlson said. "Right now we provide coverage seven days a week, 10 hours a day, but with this program we'll be covering seven days a week, 20 hours a day."

Besides providing extra coverage, the new system will allow dogs to become better at what they do well.

Kari and Jake, two English Labrador retrievers that were assigned to officers three weeks ago, are constantly training to become top dogs when it comes to sniffing out drugs.

Other K-9 units would probably train Kari and Jake as both bomb and narcotic dogs to save money, Carlson said, but that defeats the purpose of what K-9 2000 is trying to accomplish.

"A lot of agencies do use dual-purpose dogs, but we stay away from that," Carlson said. "Dual dogs may be able to look for both drugs and explosives, but many times they don't do either very well. We've found it's better to bring them in and train them to do one thing very well."

At about $4,500 per dog, providing every officer with two dogs instead of one may seem like an expensive proposition, but that depends on what you compare it to.

"A fully trained drug or bomb dog will easily run $10,000," Carlson said. "So we take them in untrained and teach them exactly what they will be doing for us."

In a recent training exercise, Kari showed her stuff, locating in a matter of minutes marijuana, methamphetamine and heroin residue hidden in a filing cabinet, a golf cart and clothing.

It will take about eight weeks to fully train Kari, who has been working with officer Robert Johnson and Ex, Johnson's patrol dog.

"All of the dogs we use are born and bred in Europe as hunting dogs," Johnson said. "We look at 100 dogs and maybe pick out two or three that we think can work for us."

Potential Metro dogs are given a complete physical and are purchased with what amounts to a four-year warranty. If the dogs have any problems with their health or their work, they can be exchanged for another dog, Carlson said.

Kari and the department's other narcotics dogs are used to sniff around for drugs in cars, homes, businesses and school lockers as part of the Zero Weapons, Zero Tolerance program.

The bomb dogs are similar to the narcotics dogs except that their noses are trained to smell for guns and explosives, while the patrol dogs are used to track down fleeing or hiding suspects.

Labradors and springer spaniels are usually trained for bomb and narcotics work, but because of the boundless energy of those breeds, they ride in a cage in the back of the K-9 patrol vehicle while on duty.

"They tend to get a little hyper," Johnson said.

German shepherds and Belgian malinois are the dogs of choice for patrol and roam freely inside the officers' sport utility vehicles.

"There are a lot of instances where having a bomb or drug dog along with a patrol dog makes our lives and the community's a lot easier," Smitley said. "Maybe we're chasing a suspect with a patrol dog, and he throws out a gun or drugs in a dark field. Instead of calling for a specific dog to sniff around for it, we'll already have one there."

Jace Radke is a reporter for the Las Vegas Sun. He can be reached at (702) 259-2318 or by e-mail at jace@lasvegassun.com.