Page 444 - NIXBOOK

Ok let’s go back to the beginning and see how this all started.. The PPD’s first K9, in 1998, was a black lab named Cole. He had
two handlers; when the first one (John Halsted) got promoted to an undercover detective position after a couple years, the dog
got transferred to his second handler (Dan La France), who worked with him for another 7 years.

After Cole’s retirement, a third officer took over; Officer Jay Gillen. Jay was a transfer/lateral hire from the Port Gamble Tribal
Police and he already had a K9 partner there, which was allowed to come with him. His dog was a big fluffy German Shepard
named Aiko. When Aiko retired, a new pupper named Kaiser was in the lineup but the K9 position was suddenly cut when the
recession hit us hard and Chief Swiney the Hun cancelled the whole program, starting a 5 year period with no department dog.
Later when that Chief was gone and 2014 came around, our police dog program was reinstated when the then-new chief (Al
Townsend) convinced the mayor and city council to fund a canine team again.
Before Townsend’s new dog program got started officially, I got a heads up from one of the sergeants who called me into his
office one day. He told me “The new chief is going to talk the mayor and council into reinstating our canine program.” “Oh
that’s cool,” I said. He looked up from his paperwork at me. “You could be our new canine handler, if you want.” I was silent and
realized that although I had never really thought about that before, it did sound interesting. “Think about it,” he said. And so I
went home and thought about it for a long time. I knew that having a dog partner would be a pretty huge commitment. It would
mean that I would be responsible for not just myself but for a partner that I would have to be watch over and keep track of
nonstop, every day. In hot days I’d have to make sure the dog didn’t overheat, and on cold days I’d have to make sure it was
warm, and there would be water breaks and potty breaks and I’d have to put him on and off the leash every time I got him out
of the car, and when he went places with me out of the car I’d have to hold the doors open for him and make sure other dogs
didn’t walk up to us make sure little kids didn’t pull his tail and on and on etc. etc.

I carefully weighed the pros and cons and finally decided that it would be a fun challenge to undertake for the last third of my
career. Also, I had vowed that I was not going to turn into one of those lazy old cops who let all the new guys do all the work;
the kind of guy who was “retired on duty” and just coasted the last several years doing as little work as possible. No, I wanted to
stay productive and leave a lasting good impression, and I knew this collateral duty would help keep me busy.
So after a lot of careful deliberation I decided to go for it. I submitted the required letter of interest, but with a twist: I stipulated
two conditions that I wanted met. One, I wanted a good looking, official-looking special dog. Not a stupid looking dog. I wanted
a dog with Command Presence! Some kind of a good looking black or yellow Labrador Retriever that could double as a model
for an L.L. Bean or Cabela’s catalog, you know? The other condition I stated was that I didn’t want to have to switch to a night
shift and work in the dark. The sergeants and chief discussed it and both conditions were agreed upon, and I was selected as the
next department’s K9 Handler, which turned out to a pretty exciting time in my police career.
Our source for a new dog was a professional dog trainer lady who lived across Puget Sound in Arlington. We signed a contract
with her, sent her $7,000 dollars, and waited for her to find a good dog for us. And we waited. The weeks turned to months, and
we kept waiting, because there was a significant disparity between the supply and demand in the police K9 world at that time
in Washington, due to the fact that marijuana had just been legalized for anybody over 21 and it was no longer an illegal drug
anymore. Which created problems for police drug dog and handlers, because they had all been trained to sniff out marijuana
along with the other serious drugs like heroin and cocaine. Now you may not know this, but dogs can’t tell their handlers what
exactly they’re smelling; they’re all trained to give an alert to whatever illegal drugs they’re trained to detect and there is no way
really that their handlers have a clue which exact drug it is that the dog may be detecting and alerting to. Every K9 handler in
the state then faced a challenge: what happens when their dog alerts to an odor source, like a drug dealer’s car, and it turns out
that the only drug in there is marijuana? Which is actually legal? Actually, the fear was, among police chiefs and sheriffs and
prosecutors especially, was that a drug dog was sooner or later was going to sniff and alert on a drug house or a car or something,
the cops would find massive amounts of cocaine or heroin or something, and a competent defense attorney would argue in court