What the Dog Knows (18 page)

The dog's first job is to intimidate so that a suspect surrenders before a dog or any other weapon is deployed. Terry Fleck, a legal specialist in the use of police K9, is clear: He considers them a “use of force elimination tool.”

If the suspect doesn't surrender, the dog's job is to go in, find the person, and bite him. Or, infrequently, her. Unlike guns or even Tasers, police K9s in the United States so rarely kill a suspect that there's only one example in major case law. Just as a comparison, pet dogs and strays do much more damage: They killed thirty-one people in 2011. Tasers caused about five hundred deaths in the last decade. As Charlie Mesloh noted, whenever a particular use-of-force method becomes popular, the incidents of its misuse rise as well.

The occasional misuse of patrol dogs creates enormous bad press, though, which in turn can spur lawsuits and overwrought and under-researched recommendations and edicts that spill over and affect the responsible units. The bad cases have multiple consequences. In 2001, following the media exposure of two K9 units, one on either side of the country, with out-of-control K9 officers, the U.S. Department of Justice decided that it would be better to shift paradigms and recommend that K9 units use a system called “bark and hold” rather than “bite and hold.” In other words, the patrol dogs were supposed to simply circle the suspect, or to stand and bark at the suspect until that person tried to use force against the dog or the officer. At that point, the dog was allowed to bite. The DOJ didn't have much evidence on bark-and-hold effectiveness before recommending the change. And thousands of K9 units across the country already trained bite and hold.

Charlie Mesloh decided to look at the issue. After all, the DOJ was recommending a huge change with little research, and three quarters of Florida units used bite and hold.

The concept of bark and hold sounds great. No teeth. The dog scares the suspect and holds him without harm until the officer claps on handcuffs and leads the chagrined suspect away. It's the best of all worlds. The only problem? Charlie Mesloh found, when he did a careful study in Florida, that bark and hold was “a good marketing tool”—and little else. The dogs trained in bark and hold actually bit suspects
more
often than dogs trained in bite and hold. The method inevitably gives the suspect more time to use a weapon on either the handler or the dog. There's no national tracking system for patrol dogs injured or killed by suspects, but the numbers are substantial.

There are lots of good reasons to use dogs for criminal apprehension. If the dog is well trained, the handler can control him in ways he can't control any other weapon. An officer can't recall a bullet once it's left the gun chamber. Once an officer has pushed the trigger on a Taser, he can't change his mind. A dog is different—in principle, at least. That's because good patrol dogs don't arrive with on and off
switches already installed. Training a dog to the point where he looks like a well-oiled machine is a beautiful thing, but being able to stop an enthusiastic and driven dog from taking a bite takes skilled training and handling. Lughar's selective deafness wasn't ideal; however, it was understandable and fixable.

•  •  •

As Steve Sprouse and I drove to the next training area, the aging patrol car's big engine shaking the floorboards, we talked. Not about why law enforcement uses dogs in this manner. In this country, that decision was made decades ago. Ideally, patrol dogs are used to stop dangerous suspects, and Steve wants them to do a good job of it. The dog should give one solid, full-mouthed bite with no hesitation, no coming off the suspect, or giving the suspect a chance to use a gun or weapon on the dog or officer or bystanders. No more and no less, although that, too, depends on what's happening in a chaotic environment. A dog with a good bite can do less damage than a dog chittering up and down someone's arm, biting and rebiting like a psychotic typewriter. Or nipping, or not biting at all, both of which create more problems. Any patrol dog who hesitates before going in on a decoy during training needs work.

Steve was a green handler himself back in 1989. He had a green dog, a handsome, bold German shepherd named Rick. Rick was a Schutzhund champion. The sport of Schutzhund, like advanced obedience in a show ring, is an elaborate and difficult performance that includes bite work.

The call came in one night around eight
P.M
.: Someone had robbed a convenience store at gunpoint in a strip mall. Steve responded, and soon he and Rick were pounding after the suspect.

Rick went in on the suspect and bit him but didn't hold on. He simply wasn't used to street conditions. Rick had been in Schutzhund competitions where everything was the same: a regulation field, a regulation
target, and a regulation bite. This situation was the opposite of regulation. Rick was used to a guy wearing a bite sleeve. The suspect wasn't moving like a Schutzhund decoy, arm pitched at a perfect angle, with a bite sleeve. Rick wasn't stupid; there was nothing to bite. The armed suspect, higher than a kite on drugs, easily got away from Rick's uncertain mouth. Rick figured he'd done enough biting for the night. Steve had to stop the suspect, since Rick wouldn't. By the time backup arrived—and it wasn't long—the officer could see the guy was swinging a gun toward Steve. The backup officer shot the suspect six times before he dropped. In the chaos of struggle, the officer shot Steve as well. The nine-millimeter slug shattered Steve's humerus, severed his radial nerve, destroyed his outer tricep. Steve's arm was hanging by a thread of tissue.

That was when Rick decided it was okay to come back in and “reengage.”

“I could see the dog had the guy by the upper leg. That was good,” said Steve in his measured way. “We got success. It was painful success, but we got it.”

The suspect lived and Steve lived. But as Steve was lying in his hospital bed, arm sewed back on, he stewed. The backup officer had done what he had to. If Rick had done his job properly, Steve—and possibly the suspect—might not have been shot in the first place.

It would be a year and a half before Steve could go back on patrol. Rick wasn't kicked out of the police K9 business. It wasn't his fault. Instead, Steve, his arm in a cast, retrained Rick. He set up scenarios that mimicked real life, not the Schutzhund ring. He weaned Rick off equipment, so the dog didn't think a bite sleeve needed to be there for him to bite. It's not just Schutzhund-trained dogs who do this; police K9s can all too easily become sleeve-dependent. As one K9 trainer noted of bite sleeves, they should come with a warning label: “Use sparingly for best results.”

Steve's cast had a bone-growth stimulator that gave his reconstructed
arm regular electromagnetic shocks, a kind of human e-collar reminding Steve of his primary job: Train the dog, train the dog.

Man and dog went back to work in 1990. The first night back on patrol, Steve got a call: a suspect attacking an officer. Steve responded and sent in Rick. Rick bit the suspect. Rick held the suspect. He did his job. And he kept doing his job for a good number of years, until he retired.

Thanks to Rick's initial failure, Steve Sprouse is now a bite specialist, considered among the top aggression trainers in the Southeast and perhaps the country. More important than all the national awards he's garnered, Steve has used his patrol dogs in hundreds of apprehensions without getting shot and without having to use a bone-growth stimulator again.

Steve passes on his hard-earned dog knowledge. He trains his fellow Broward County officers and nearby police units. He also travels across the United States and the world, teaching patrol-dog scenario work, tracking, bite work, and the critical importance of obedience work.

•  •  •

As Steve Sprouse and I arrived at our final training spot for the night, the automated cyclone fence gate squeaked and whirred. We were at the deserted water treatment plant in Oakland Park, Florida, with its huge stucco buildings and massive wastewater treatment basins. A street light cast bluish light on a strangler fig that embraced one of the fat water treatment basins, inserting hundreds of loopy roots in every crevice. It looked like a vegetative squid, the same species of ficus that pulled apart the stone temples of Angkor Wat in Cambodia.

Instead of Buddhist ruins, we were standing in the shadows of a 1940s-era wastewater treatment plant. Feral cats and raccoons slipped through the shadows. Ferns spilled out of the open ends of cast-iron
pipes that once sent treated water back into circulation in Fort Lauderdale. On the tops of the treatment ponds, where paddles once stirred the city's sludge, dirt had settled, creating Jolly Green Giant–sized planters. Forty feet up, it was a jungle. “It's very cool up there,” Steve said. In front of us was a huge building, open doors gaping, old equipment everywhere. To our side were a couple of acres of landfill equipment: bulldozers and concrete blocks and massive garbage cans—and more shadows.

Dave Lopez's kids were almost recovered from the flu, and he was less sleep-deprived. Lughar was back to almost perfect, although he was a bit softer on the bite than Steve ultimately wanted him to be.

Steve sent the green handlers and their dogs away from the scene to wait to be called. I offered a hand, and Steve and I went about staging an illusion for the handlers that would teach them to trust their dogs' noses.

The grasses and weeds on the side of the hill next to the plant were thigh-high. The sandy hill was steep, nearly a forty-five-degree angle. As I crawled up in the dark with Steve, almost on my hands and knees, I thought about Florida's coral snakes. I'd never seen one in the wild, but their identifying stripes—“red touches yellow, kill a fellow”—wouldn't be visible in this darkness.

It took us a mere forty-five minutes to set the scene, although it felt longer. We were both sweating in the mild night air. I hauled three big waste containers from the other side of the public works and tugged them up onto the hill, scattering them so they looked like they had been dropped willy-nilly by aliens out of UFOs. Steve found the old hole dug for a training two years before. He cleared it of the roots and weeds that had taken over, and we used our feet to stomp the garbage can down into the hole until its lid was even with the ground. With his penknife, Steve made a small hole in the lid. Casting about the waning beam of a flashlight, I finally found a tough golden graduation tassel on the floor of one of the buildings that would do the trick; we
knotted it and ran it through the small hole, so the handler who hid in the can could hold down the lid if a dog found him and decided to dig him out. We tested it and retested it, tugging hard on the tassel, amending it with an extra knot. We pulled brush over the can and stood back and admired our handiwork. The buried garbage can was invisible even a few feet away.

We stashed a decoy handler, helping him into his garbage-can prison. Steve handed him a latex arm. Steve had constructed it from liquid rubber, using his son's arm as a mold. It was a work of art—ductile and creepy—a toothsome reward, just in case a dog and handler managed to work out the elaborate problem. We stood at the bottom of the hill, looking up, bemoaning age and complaining joints.

Steve got on the radio. The first handler, Dave Lopez, arrived in his patrol car, pulling up hard just inside the gate. Steve briefed Dave on what was happening—maybe one, maybe two guys ran this way after a robbery. He warned Dave that feral cats and raccoons were everywhere. That the guys were dangerous. Just over the hill, people were having a late-night barbecue. “Be careful,” Steve warned him.

Dave didn't start the search where he should have, given the wind direction out of the northwest. It was a beginner's error, one that gave him a huge advantage. Lughar dragged him around the near side of the mushroom-shaped treatment plant, where Steve and I had retraced our steps, tracking us backward along the bottom of the hill. Then Lughar flipped his whole body. He had hit the decoy's scent coming down the side of the hill in less than a minute.

Steve and I watched with admiration and some dismay as back-to-perfect Lughar made short work of the puzzle. He surged up into the underbrush and pounded the lid of the can with his teeth, muzzle, and feet, making the handler inside howl in misery as his fingers got pinched trying to hold the lid down. There was no time for Steve to play with Dave's mind by telling him it was clearly a raccoon that Lughar was after. That howl was all too human.

It was over in two or three minutes. Steve was discouraged by the fast pace but determined to get some bang for our dramatic stage-setting buck.

Pete and his large sable shepherd, Diesel, were next. Steve was no longer sure that the scenario would slow them down as much as he wanted it to. This time Steve made certain that Pete had pulled well inside the compound, away from Lughar's clever backtrack.

“Hey, Diesel, boy,” Steve said. Diesel was already staring out into the dark, ignoring Steve. Steve turned to Pete, frowning. “There are a lot of cats, raccoons, people north of the complex, so just be careful. Give your warning.”

Steve watched as the released Diesel set up a solid pattern, moving through the deserted Bobcats and stacks of palettes and concrete culverts on the flat, doing natural switchbacks. “He's got really nice structure.” It wasn't clear whether he was talking about Diesel's powerful, sleek looks or his search pattern. Probably both. Diesel worked the area like an old pro, ignoring a cat as it slid away from him, clearing a half-acre with ease. Diesel and Pete were methodical; they were also raising our hopes that they might not solve the problem as quickly as Lughar and Dave had.

“Wouldn't you just love to be inside a dog's head?” Steve asked quietly, arms folded across his spare frame, watching as Diesel swung his huge muzzle, and adjusted his body so it followed his big nose. The breeze had shifted slightly, carrying scent. I could hear the faint sound of Latin music and voices from over the top of the hill.