Katrina Henes
Contemporary Issues in Criminal Justice
Research Paper on Article 17
12/16/13

Police dogs have become a vital part of the police force. They are well trained, obedient dogs that, unlike humans, do not fear the daily challenges that are put upon them while on the job. Police units throughout the world use K-9 units. They are employed by many different police forces and by many different governmental agencies through out the world. Police dogs can search 400 to 500 packages in a half an hour. They can search a car every minute. When a dog searches a car the speed that a dog does it in saves time, when a human searcher could only do about one car every twenty minutes. Also, according to Canada Customs, in one year, 1993, the dogs searched 80,000 cars, 11 million packages and 6 million units of cargo. From this, they found 58,000 pounds of marijuana, 3,027 pounds of hashish, 18 pounds of cocaine, 29 pounds of heroin, 5 pounds of opium and 4.3 million dosage units of illegal prescription-type drugs. The combined value of all these drugs in 1993 was $192.5 million dollars.
Throughout the years, dogs have been trained using natural scents as well as artificial scents; they continue to use this training by tracking people and substances in training drills and in real life situations, despite every on the job hazard. As man evolved, he began to use dogs to help hunt prey and search for food to be able to survive. However, as he became more civilized, he needed to use dogs for more than those three simple things. He needed dogs to be trained to perform certain tasks as well as specialized tasks. This is how selective breeding began. Certain dogs were used to herd sheep and were common on a farm. These dogs became known as Shepherd dogs. The German Shepherd in particular, is a late breed of various breeds of Shepherd dogs in Germany. Through selective breeding, they were adapted for the rough job they had and trained for the new ones. Their shaggy coat developed into a thick, dense, short coat. They are relatively tall, (22-26 inches) and have a medium sized head with a long nose. This large body helps it support more muscle mass, so German Shepherds are usually very powerful. They have extremely powerful jaws with strong teeth, a dogs jaw can excert upward of seven hundred and fifty pounds per square inch and have a scissors type bite, so they just chew it up, tear it up, grind and shred whatever they are chewing. German Shepherds are usually used as police dogs because they are natural born working dogs. They have been trained and bread to be used to work, so they are very easily trained and extremely loyal. They are restrained and will usually not attack suddenly, but they can fight well. They are judged by breeders as very smart and are considered to have great judgment.
Dogs have been used for police work for over 75 years and are used all over the world in such places as the North America, Europe, the Far East and Russia. New York City was the first city to use police dogs, but with little to no success and money running out, they abandoned the idea. Then later, in London, they were very successful with the training of police dogs. This was taken up by other nearby towns, and soon spread to many large cities and through out the world. Early ways in which canine units were used were crude and probably explain the reason they were not successful at first. They would use the dogs as a crime deterrent, releasing them into the city after curfew, free to attack anything they wanted. Now, both dogs and partner go through very specialized and rigorous training. Current use of dogs on police forces is divided into five categories: Search, attack and capture, detection of explosives, detection of narcotics and a deterrent to crime. The search portion is used to find lost people as well as people trapped in wreckage or other things, and to find lost items. Attack and capture is used for exactly what it sounds like. The dogs are used to pursuit the criminal that is on the run and to take him down to the ground and hold him there until the dog's partner can arrive to arrest him. Detection of explosives and narcotics is used to find explosive substances and drugs, usually ones that are hidden. Deterring crime is a specialized field. Basically, the dog is trained to look very intimidating to people to keep them from wanting to commit a crime. The dogs are also trained to detect vapor wakes which is a very intense training for the dogs in which they are trained to detect explosives. Vapor Wakes are the scent particals left in the air for the dogs to track the way the dogs do this is they take short, sharp breathes as many as ten per second drawing the scent deep into the nasal cavity to the olfactory epithelium, in which the recepters there are a hundred times denser than in a human and can detect a wide array of molecules. Dogs are also very capable of tracking the supects better than we can track them, in 2000 dogs were able to track down suspects ninety three percent of the time where police teams of two to four police officers could only track dawn fifty nine percent of suspects. New York City is now experimenting with a simpler version of the canine navigation. It acquired an infared video system that just so happens to mount on a dog's back and can be remotely monitored by police. The purchase of this device was made after the raid on Osama Bin Laden. The dogs are well trained to listen to their handlers commands that the dogs will not even go to the bathroom until their handler gives them the command to empty then the dog will then find a place to empty but the dog will take the second look at the handler before it relieves it self and make sure that it is still ok for them to relieve them selves. The handlers do take the dogs home because when they are first partnered with the dog that means they are now partnered with that dog for life so the handlers do get to take the dog home so the dog can still have a life outside of work where they can just be a dog and not be a working tool to get a job done. So in conlusion to this article I would like to state that without dogs in the police field we wouldn't have the crime rates that we have now they would more than likely be much higher and without the dogs we wouldn't be able to catch half of the suspects that are caught on a daily bases by dogs.