‘She was lucky she got away,’ Claude murmured, shaking his head.
The thrill of the chase is all well and good, but the detectives take over once the dog and handler have done their work. Often handlers don’t hear much once their job is done, but this job made front-page news in the Border Mail.
Because of the lateness of the hour, Claude stayed overnight in Barnawartha. The next day, he got a copy of the Border Mail to see the story featured on the front page. His mum, who lived in Beechworth, got the same paper each morning, and read about her son catching an abductor. And then she told all her friends about his fine work.
Claude never found out what sentence the man got, and he wasn’t really interested in following the story. This is typical of the work of the dog handlers. They come, they catch crooks and then they drive off into the dawn, with their tired canine colleagues in the back of the car.
After a working life of jumping fences, Rex developed a back injury and retired to Claude’s house. He enjoyed his new status as a family pet with the run of the backyard and the affection of Claude’s family.
One goes, and another one comes. Kruze was a short-haired black-and-tan German shepherd, a little shorter and lighter than some of his canine colleagues, weighing in at 33 kilograms. A small dog with a big heart and a big character.
Kruze was known as a junkyard dog – he’d been tied up in a backyard that was adjacent to the path to a local school. He would bark at the kids, who would run sticks along the fence to stir up the dog until he was out of control. The owners brought him in to the squad, which assessed him as suitable for police work.
Kruze proved to be a good tracking dog, and he was good for critical incident work. When Kruze was in work mode, Claude had to have eyes in the back of his head, the dog was so quick and agile. Because he was a bit smaller, he became a little dynamo. He was also a one-person dog and would ignore others in favour of Claude.
While Rex and his replacement Kruze got along well, Rex did feel a little jealous when Claude went off to work, and would whine every time they left him behind. One day, Claude was home washing the work car. He’d left the gate open, and went inside for a minute. When he came back, Rex was gone.
Claude found him in the back of the squad car, waiting to go to work. ‘Enjoy your retirement, buddy,’ said Claude, leading Rex back to the backyard.
Once Claude and Kruze were called to an aggravated burglary in Sunshine, where four shots had been fired inside a suburban house. Reports at the scene described two offenders, possibly both armed. Facing down an armed offender makes the dog handler vulnerable. While the handler carries a weapon like every other police officer, it is not usual for them to wield it. They use both hands to hold on to the dog’s lead, and handlers have a natural reluctance to fire in the direction of their dog.
Witnesses at the shooting had said that one offender had escaped out the back door and over the back fence. The other offender had fled out the front door. Claude set off after the crook that had gone over the back fence. Kruze picked up a scent straight away – up and over. Six backyards later, Kruze’s head went up and he started pulling more strongly on the lead. Claude knew that the crook was in the next yard. Using the radio, he gave his approximate location in a low voice.
Suddenly, there was a bang. It could have been a shed door banging. Claude unclipped the lead, and sent Kruze over the fence, following quickly behind him. There was a second bang. Claude ran down the driveway. No sign of the dog; no sign of the shooter. Sweeping the area with the torch, Claude saw a piece of Kruze’s tracking line caught under the tyre of a trailer parked in the driveway.
Claude guessed that the long tracking line must have snagged under the wheel and broken with the momentum of an excited police dog flying past. At least, that was the best-case scenario. The second bang that Claude had heard . . . he hoped it wasn’t the gunman firing at his dog.
Claude ran out into the street, where he could hear a whining sound. His heart beat faster as he raced up the driveway. If his dog was injured, he was dangerous to anyone who went near him; in a panic, an injured animal will lash out.
Luckily it was a whine of frustration, not a whine of injury. With a huge sense of relief, Claude found Kruze scratching and clawing at a back fence too high for him to scale. The handler climbed up and hoisted his dog up and onto the roof of a shed adjacent to the fence. Claude and Kruze made their way through yet another yard, across a road and up another driveway. They reached another fence – up and over. Across another street they went, up another driveway, through another yard.
Kruze was frantic. He loved catching crooks and this one was close but elusive. Claude didn’t let go of what was left of Kruze’s tracking line. He didn’t want to risk losing the dog again. They tracked through another backyard and over another fence. In the next yard, Kruze led Claude down a narrow side path. The dog stopped at the corner of the house, and then did the dog version of a U-turn. Often, if the wind is blowing in the wrong direction, the dog follows it and then turns when he realises that he’s overshot the scent. Which meant Kruze had overshot the gunman.
As his dog started heading back in his direction, Claude’s eyes widened. He turned to his side and all of a sudden could see the crook right next to him, crouched down in a daisy bush. Without hesitation, Claude issued the command for Kruze to take him down. In a swirl of fur and crook and daisies, growls and barks and screams, Claude grabbed the back of the man’s jacket and dragged him clear of the daisy bush.
Claude called off the dog, as the man lay sprawled on the ground with his arms outstretched. Kruze did his job by standing sentinel and barking his head off. Claude praised his dog as he called for help over the radio. The problem he faced was that he didn’t know where he was. Handlers had ways of helping direct backup to them; they could radio in the numberplate of a car parked in a driveway in the hope that the car belonged to the house occupant, which meant the address would come up on the computer. But in this case, Claude couldn’t risk leaving the sprawled gunman even for a second. Here’s how they found him. Cruising police cars turned off their radios and wound down their windows and listened for sounds of the dog barking. Kruze played his part by barking up a storm.
It took around five minutes for the local police to locate Claude. Nowadays, all handlers are issued with iPhones with GPS locators, which will give their location in an instant. Once the locals got to the backyard, Claude moved his very excited German shepherd away from the scene. Until a police dog calms down, he can’t be relied on not to bite anyone in the vicinity.
Some dog handler jobs do not end well. Claude has been involved in many jobs where he and his dogs have searched for missing people who have never been found. A business manager from Warrnambool disappeared from work, leaving behind his credit cards and wallet. Extensive searches failed to find him, and the man never turned up. On occasions such as this, the dog handler and his dog can’t save the day.
Luckily, there are many other occasions where they can.
CLAUDE’S TRAINING TIPS
Set the ground rules early.
Be consistent – if the dog is an inside dog and it’s not allowed on the couch, never let it on the couch.
Use repetition in training.
Don’t correct a dog for something it doesn’t understand.
If you get a new pup, sit down with the family and decide together what the dog is and is not allowed to do.
CHAPTER 13
Looking for drugs in unlikely places
There’s a funny picture doing the rounds on Facebook. A drug dog handler stands next to a young man at what looks like a festival. The dog handler’s caption says, ‘My dog’s telling me that you’ve got drugs on you.’
The young man looks incredulous. ‘You’re accusing me of taking drugs?’ he says. ‘You’re the one with the talking dog!’
Someone sent this picture to Leading Senior Constable Peter Wilson, and it appealed to his sense of humour. He saved it on his p
hone and shows people for a laugh. But behind the humour, there is the truth. While narcotics detector dogs don’t use words to speak, they can still tell their handlers a very good story.
A drug dog has a unique sense of smell that can detect beyond what an object seems to be. What looks like a regular spray can might actually be a container that has been hollowed out and used to hide drugs. While a police officer can’t tell the difference, a narcotics dog finds it easy.
Peter ‘Willo’ Wilson has spent most of his career in the Dog Squad. He had just three years of general duties after he joined the police force, then spent the next twenty-five years with the dogs. His career in drug detection has given him a world of experience.
As a youngster, Willo had an affinity with his pets. He would have been a vet, but he mucked around too much at school to get the grades. The next best thing was the Dog Squad, and when the then chief commissioner, Mick Miller, shook Willo’s hand at the Police Academy on graduation day, he asked the young recruit what he wanted to do in the police force. ‘Dog Squad, Sir,’ said Willo without hesitation.
When Willo joined the squad in 1990 he became an explosives dog handler and was given a German shepherd called Bindi. She was the first operational dog from the new Victoria Police puppy-breeding program. High expectations were placed on Bindi’s furry shoulders; luckily, she lived up to her promise. She had a perfect retrieval instinct, and if there was nothing for her to pick up, she would find any little objects and put them at Willo’s feet. She would go all day, with energy to burn. Bindi required her handler to be animated and match her energy. Willo stepped up to the plate and the two formed a strong team for the best part of the next decade.
The Dog Squad’s charter required two dogs to be trained to work explosives. While Bindi was a great worker, Willo felt opportunities were lost for her to reach her full potential. For the two explosives detector dogs in Melbourne – a town where explosions were rare – there wasn’t really enough to do. Willo and the other explosives dog handler did such things as venue clearances for visiting dignitaries, but generally explosives detection work was light on the ground. A bomb hoax in an Olympic Airlines 747, where Bindi had to sniff vast amounts of luggage only to find nothing, was as exciting as it got. It also meant that a good dog and a good cop were under-utilised.
Willo felt Bindi was made for something bigger, something that would give her more opportunity to shine. Because she was female, Bindi couldn’t be a general purpose dog – all of which are male. The only other option was drug detection. Willo saw other handlers at the squad working with drug detector dogs who got much more exciting jobs – big crooks, big hauls, and big arrests. He began riding along with general purpose dog handlers. He would put Bindi in the back of the car alongside the general purpose dogs, and they both got a taste of what was happening on the streets.
After a while, the bosses at the squad agreed that Bindi should be retrained across to narcotics detection. Willo was hugely relieved; an animated, boisterous dog needed to work hard. And she had the perfect temperament and enthusiasm for the rigours of drug work.
From the first day of training, Bindi showed an incredible aptitude for the work. If she smelt something in a cupboard, she quickly learnt to open the door and have a look. If she couldn’t open the cupboard, she would scratch at the door or bark. In other words, she let everyone know she’d found something. Other cops loved her because anyone could tell when she was indicating, which meant everyone on the scene became an expert.
However, her talent and dexterity nearly proved fatal on one early job. Willo and Bindi were searching a house for drugs. In the kitchen, Bindi opened a cupboard under the sink and found a big bowl full of what looked like flour. The bowl was covered by a cloth, so Bindi grabbed the cloth and shook it from side to side. At the time, drug detector dogs were rewarded with game play. They were allowed to rip up a bit of the packaging – usually the plastic wrapping on marijuana – and paw at it and tear it apart. It made them very enthusiastic for the job and added to their sense of excitement. It wasn’t dangerous because the dog didn’t ingest any of the drugs.
And so, when Bindi grabbed the cloth covering the big bowl of flour, Willo didn’t think anything of it. Then she tore it up – just like she did in training. Willo grabbed the rag and played a bit of tug of war with Bindi.
Unfortunately, the white substance wasn’t flour; it was pure powdered amphetamine – largely unheard of and a rare find at the time. The drug had infiltrated the rag. It wasn’t long before Willo noticed a change come over his dog. ‘I don’t think it’s flour,’ he told the other cops at the house. ‘There’s something wrong with Bindi.’
Then the dog started to fit.
Everyone panicked, and Bindi was lifted into the Dog Squad station wagon and driven straight to the vet, where dog and handler would spend the next twelve hours. Large doses of Valium brought Bindi back down from her amphetamine overdose.
It was a tense time for her waiting handler. Aside from his fondness for his canine offsider, there’s a saying in the Dog Squad: ‘no dog, no job’. It makes every handler very careful of the health and safety of their dogs. Whether it was true or not, some of the old hands at the squad would say to the younger members: ‘If anything happens to your dog, you have to go back where you came from.’ There was no way Willo wanted to leave the Dog Squad.
Willo took Bindi home and monitored her for the next couple of days, which was how long it took her to return to normal. While waiting for his dog to recover, Willo reflected on the lesson he had just learnt. As a narcotics dog handler, he had to be more careful. Things weren’t always what they seemed. Flour in a druggie’s kitchen might not be flour. And unfamiliar drugs could turn up in unlikely places. After that job, all the drug dog handlers began carrying packets of bicarbonate of soda to use in an emergency. If their dogs accidentally ingested drugs, the bicarb would make them vomit.
Some of the best jobs in those early days with Bindi involved roadblocks stopping outlaw motorcycle gangs. At one such roadblock, Bindi waited patiently by Willo’s side as the huge bikes and their riders rumbled to a halt next to police cars with flashing lights. As soon as they were stationary, Willo moved Bindi among the idling bikes. Other cops performed breath tests and took names and registration details to gather intelligence on the who’s who of bikies.
Willo would casually manoeuvre the dog close to the saddlebags and wander among the waiting bikes. That began a game of ignoring. The bikies ignored the presence of the dog and Willo, and stared straight ahead, looking tough. Willo tried to look like he was taking a Sunday stroll with his pooch. The whole thing had a touch of theatre to it. There weren’t a lot of drugs found on these searches.
In the lead-up to an event at the Mildura Speedway, some of the bikies had been through three roadblocks. But they didn’t have drug detector dogs. Fourth time unlucky. In a joint operation between the New South Wales force and Victoria Police, cops were stopping bikies and cars full of young lads as they came over the border across the Chaffey Bridge, which spanned the Murray. Willo and Bindi had flown up on the small police helicopter known as the Squirrel.
The roadblock cops had stopped a carload of young chaps, and things had become a bit aggressive. The chopper landed near the car, and Willo and Bindi jumped out and ran over. After a quick sniff around, Bindi indicated under the back seat. Willo dug his hand down and pulled out a package of marijuana with all the artistry of a magician. He handed it to the local cops, who were a little gobsmacked at the helicopter and the quick search.
‘I always travel this way,’ said Willo before jogging his dog back to the chopper. How good is this job! he thought. No paperwork, and a flight home.
Well-known Drug Squad detective Lachlan McCulloch, who has written a couple of books about his time catching crooks, loved Bindi. While he never forgot her name, he could never remember Willo’s name. He always called him Bindi’s Driver.
The dog had a dominant personality; she took
centre stage at drug searches. She was renowned for her cupboard-opening abilities, and for barking when she found drugs. In the narcotics area, many searches had detectives and handlers scouring the premises at the same time, thus guaranteeing a captive audience to witness the skills of the dogs. Indeed, the drug dogs became minor celebrities among their police colleagues.
Even when doing street sweeps – using drug detector dogs to monitor lines outside nightclubs – there might be a hundred people watching the show. And that meant a hundred people were always left in awe at the abilities of these clever dogs. Unlike their general purpose colleagues, who took off after crooks and rarely had an audience, drug detector dogs stayed around for the applause. And Bindi loved every minute of it.
The dogs were so clever and they never stopped surprising their handlers. One time Bindi alerted at a conifer tree in the driveway of a suburban house. Intel said that the crook who lived in the house had taken delivery of 3 kilograms of cannabis. Bindi didn’t find it in the house, but indicated the tree on the way out. Sure enough, there was the cryovac package hidden up in the tree. Just in case anyone missed her point, Bindi sat at the base of the tree and barked her head off, looking up into its branches.
Training techniques have changed over the time that Willo has been in the Dog Squad. While Bindi barked and opened cupboards and played an active role in searches, new training wisdom dictates that it is safer for dogs to be trained as passive alert detectors or PAD dogs. This means when a dog detects a scent, it simply sits down and waits for a food reward. In New South Wales they began using labradors for dance parties and street screening, because they were thought to be non-confrontational. They also have a love of food as a reward. Food rewards were quicker and more convenient than game play. As the German shepherd narcotics dogs retired, they were replaced by labs.
The Dog Squad Page 18