How Police Dogs Work

Today, police forces in most major cities use police dogs to track criminals, sniff out illegal materials, search buildings, and do other jobs human police officers can't do as well as a dog can. Not only are there thousands of police dogs on the job on any given day, but there are also hundreds of police dogs who have given their lives to protect and serve.

Why do we bother using police dogs at all? For one thing, their sense of smell is almost 50 times more sensitive than a human's. A dog can sniff out criminals, drugs, weapons, and bombs in situations where a human officer would have to search every inch, a dangerous task. In one case, Breston, a Belgian Malinois who works with the Cheektowaga Police Department in Cheektowaga, NY (a suburb of Buffalo), easily sniffed out a shipment of marijuana in heat-sealed Mylar bags, inside plastic-lined crates sealed with foam sealant, inside a closed storage garage. With his sensitive nose and a search warrant, Breston kept $3,400,000 worth of drugs off the streets.

                            Officer Daniel Smith and his K-9 partner, Breston

Dogs come in an huge variety of shapes and sizes, and not every breed of dog is suited for police work. There probably aren't any police Lhasa apsos in the world. The majority of police dogs in the world are German shepherds, although Labrador retrievers and several other breeds (like Breston, a Belgian Malinois,) are sometimes used, depending on the specific tasks they will be needed for. The key attributes of a successful police dog are intelligence, aggression, strength, and sense of smell. Most police dogs are male, and are frequently left unneutered so that they maintain their natural aggression. This aggression must be kept in check with thorough and rigorous training.


Famous Police Dogs

A few police dogs become famous. The most legendary police dog of all is probably Rin Tin Tin, a trained German shepherd who was left behind by retreating German forces in 1918. An American sergeant took him to the United States, where he went on to star in 122 films and a TV series.
Another police dog became famous because she was unique. Mattie, a black Labrador retriever with the Connecticut State Police, was trained to sniff out evidence of arson. Mattie could pick her way through the charred, dangerous ruins of a fire and point out a few small drops of gasoline, despite all the strong smells of a recent fire and all the fire and police officials walking around the scene. Mattie could identify several different chemical accelerants. She was the first operational accelerant detection dogin the country, and possibly in the world, when she went on duty in 1986. Since then, the program has been very successful, with Dolph and Rosie following in Mattie's paw prints.