Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, October 13, 1994 TAG: 9410130055
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DIANE STRUZZI STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The heroin is rolled as thin as paper in a plastic bag; tucked among the leaves of a thousand-page manual; placed atop a wheelbarrow of motor parts. In the air, there's a pungent smell of oil. On a nearby work table, food is strewn about.
Nose-first, the 85-pound Russian shepherd bounds around the room. In less than a minute, he finds the stash. He does the same when marijuana is hidden in a row of closed lockers and some crack is packaged tightly in a box.
For the shepherd, a police work dog with the Lynchburg Sheriff's Office, the drug hunt is a game. Making a find means an enthusiastic pat and a resounding, "Good boy!" from his handler.
The rewards in this line of work are simple. For Grief - pronounced Grife - his favorite is a toy fashioned from a rolled-up towel. He grasps it in his mouth and hangs on as his handler, Deputy E.W. Viar, tugs at the other end.
"You can't outrun him, and you can't hide from him," Viar says, running his hand through his shepherd's thick, dark-brown coat.
Viar, Grief and about 20 other handlers and their dogs came to the Roanoke Valley this week to take part in a workshop sponsored by the Virginia Police Work Dog Association. The organization is one of several in the state that certifies and trains police K-9 units.
With the Roanoke County Police Department acting as host this time around, the association provided a variety of training exercises - including building searches, suspect tracking and drug detection.
The goals are to establish a set of standards for K-9 teams and to sharpen the dogs' and the handlers' skills. There is no state law that requires K-9 teams to be certified. The decision of how much training and how often it is needed is left up to individual departments.
In Roanoke County, which employs three K-9 officers, certification is required on an annual basis. Dogs can turn into a liability, just like a gun or a nightstick, said Roanoke County police officer and handler John Hoover. If an officer or the police dog makes a mistake during a confrontation, it can wipe out the whole program, he said.
Training is a key element in making sure mistakes don't happen, Hoover said. The image of the police dog has evolved from a vicious animal turned on rioters to a right-hand aid for the officer during searches, arrests and community outreach events.
"We don't want a dog out here that will just bite anything that moves," said Dan Redifer, a K-9 trooper with the state police, who has worked with dogs since 1978 and is a trainer at this week's workshop.
"Dogs used to be trained in the old military style," he said, ''but now, there is more socialization work with them."
Five years ago, when Hoover was working at an upstate New York sheriff's department, he thought that becoming a canine officer would be an interesting change. The dog he was given to work with didn't fit the old bared-teeth stereotype.
After he was selected as a K-9 officer, he was given a 95-pound Rottweiler named Thor. With the dog's rich, chocolate coat, a hint of tan on the legs and at the eyes and his likable personality, he wasn't a tough sell for Hoover.
"He's protective of me," Hoover said, "but he's very approachable."
Now, officer and dog are inseparable. Hoover says he wouldn't give up being a K-9 officer for anything.
"It's a lot of hard work, but it's also rewarding," he said. "It lets me see other aspects of police work that I couldn't see as a regular uniform officer - like vice."
When Hoover moved to Roanoke in 1992, he became a part of the largest K-9 unit among Roanoke Valley departments. On nearly all of the county's drug cases, police dogs are used to expedite searches. What a human being can do in an hour or two, a dog can do in minutes, said Sgt. Chuck Mason, head of the vice unit.
Before success, however, there is constant training - at home, on vacation, during workshops. A game of fetch becomes an exercise in searching and obedience. Police dogs are trained to turn their actions on and off by one-word commands and the tone of the handler's voice.
With a pinch of tobacco in his mouth, his hands stuffed in his jeans pockets, Redifer watches a young K-9 team work a track he has laid through a wooded area in Roanoke County's Green Hill Park. First, the German shepherd dog skims some brush on the perimeter; his handler follows. The dog continues to meander by a thicket of weeds.
The dog isn't tracking, and the handler is misreading the signals. The track is a tough one - through a creek, up a steep embankment, along a rock path. At the end, Redifer has placed a decoy, actually another officer who is sporting a bite guard wrapped around his sleeve.
With some guidance by Redifer, the shepherd and his handler find the decoy, testing his bite work on the officer's padded sleeve.
Teaching a dog to track is some of the most difficult work a K-9 officer does. It takes a handler who knows his dog and a dog that knows how to distinguish among a myriad of scents.
But the results are unforgettable. Redifer remembers his first find during a track, a 10-year-old boy with Down syndrome who got lost in the woods. Officers had searched for the boy for hours. Redifer's pup found him in 10 minutes.
"You've done all this work, and it's payday," said Redifer. "I enjoy finding a lost kid as much as I do finding a bad guy."
by CNB