Page 440 - NIXBOOK

K9

One of my most rewarding assignments during my police career was as the police department’s Narcotic Detection K9 Handler.

This photo was kind of famous. Here we see Kilo wearing a shirt that used to belong to Chief Doran. For some reason long after
nd
the chief retired we still had his shirt hanging around in the locker room so one day I decided to repurpose it. City hall 2 floor
clerk Helen had some sewing skills and she modified it to fit Kilo; the sleeves were shortened, and she made the shirt open from
the back with Velcro, which is of course the easiest way to put a shirt on a dog. The shirt looked great on the dog when it was
sitting, and sitting only. In this pic he’s modeling the latest tailored modification, to include some ridiculously large iron-on
stars I got for his collar.

A few weeks after this pic was taken in 2016, Simon uploaded it to Reddit at a police officers-only page and at some point after
that somebody reposted it and then it got loose on the internets and it then started popping in different places, most of which
I never found out about. Within just a couple years the total number of different websites it showed up on was in the hundreds,
- yes literally in the hundreds - including a lot of Pinterest and Instagram and LinkedIn (?!?) and Twitter and Tumblr pages and
a lot of the popular websites back then like Chive and Ebaumsworld and several places on Imgur, where there was a helpful view
counter on one that showed over 600,000 views in just a few months which I thought was pretty darn cool and impressive. And
then it started showing up on facebook and the view count started getting really interesting: Sometimes it was just a photo, and
sometimes it showed up as a 30 second still video. Or a 15-second video. The video format was I think so the views could be
tracked and counted by whomever posted it, because photo views were not counted. I saw some Facebook pages where this
photo collected 300,000 views, 56,000 “likes” and 30,000 “shares” and 3,400 comments within just a couple weeks.

With all that sharing, it then got reposted on other Facebook pages of course, most of them which I never found out about
because I had just gotten around to signing up on Facebook around then. I know it showed up on Facebook pages about dogs,
and pages about working dogs, and police, and also on some real random pages places like “Homemaking Tips” which Susan
jokingly called “bored housewives.” One time a corrections officer at the local jail told me casually that he had seen the photo
on some police Facebook page awhile back, but he couldn’t remember which one, but it was police officer related. So I have no
clue how many views or likes that one got, but since that page was for police supporters and friends it was most likely pretty
high. I’m also sad I missed out on that one because the comments probably would have been more sensible and articulate there
than on most of the other pages, where a lot of people questioned how could the dog be a police officer if it can’t swear an oath
and those sleeves look dangerous to run in and why does the dog clearly outrank the officer and how does the dog run wearing
a tie and he’s going to overheat and dogs shouldn’t be used by police anyway and on and on. But actually most of the comments
were overwhelming positive; I’d say about 99% of the commenters were just delighted and thrilled with the photo.
One time we found out about a Facebook posting when one of Susan’s old friends – a classmate from her high school in
Pendleton, Oregon – just happened to share it on his Facebook page and then Susan saw it. Her old classmate of course had no
idea who the cop and who the dog was, he just thought it was a cool picture and Susan was all like “Oh hey guess what I know
these guys!!” On that page that he had shared it from, the view count increased by 5,000 to 8,000 PER HOUR for the first two
weeks, until slowing down to 1,000 per hour for about a week, then ending with (only) 100 views per hour. Final count after just
a month, when it was then suddenly, unexpectedly, and unceremoniously expired and removed forever: 1,341,839 views.