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And unfortunately, my presence was usually needed with an urgent immediacy because of time constraints. Meaning, the dog
was needed to sniff a car on a traffic stop, and the dog was needed like NOW, usually because the driver was still in the car and
the officer needed the K9 unit there before the stop was over. Because the United States Supreme Court had ruled that a traffic
stop could not be extended or delayed to wait for a police dog to show up and sniff it. To do so would violate the drivers’ right
to be free from unlawful detainment. So. If a traffic stop took, say, 11 minutes for the officer to investigate and write a ticket or
two, then at the end of that process the driver had to be released and could not legally be detained any longer to wait for a K9
dog to come sniff the car. In fact, the K9 unit had to do their thing while the original officer was still writing the ticket; as soon
as the officer is done with the ticket, the driver is free to go and can’t be held a second longer, even if the dog is only halfway
done sniffing the car. So time was of the essence and a fast response was critical.

One day I was on patrol when a Bremerton police officer
called for a K9 unit to come sniff this suspicious as hell car
he had stopped. The BPD K9 unit was not on duty at the
time, but I was, so I rushed out to Bremerton to go help. I set
a new land speed PR to get there quickly. When I arrived, the
BPD officer explained that the stop was taking a little longer
than usual because his printer wasn’t working, so he had to
write out a traffic ticket by hand. Quite coincidentally, this
gave me the time needed to drive the 19 miles from where I
was to his location. While he finished the ticket, I ran Kilo
around the car. What do you know right while we were
finishing (with a positive alert indicating an odor of illegal
narcotics in the car) the BPD Officer got done writing his ticket. The driver did not want to give consent to search to search his
car, so the BPD officer impounded it with a tow truck, later got a search warrant, and found the hidden drugs.

I should mention, and this is as good as a place as any, that Washington State, being run by liberals in the executive, legislative
and judicial branches, had some laws on the books that made police work way more difficult than it should have been. One
great example is that the Washington courts had decided to protect the rights of drivers to the extreme, and deny the police
search powers incident to arrest, or based on just reasonable suspicion or even probable cause. Meaning, when we stopped a car
and saw drug paraphernalia in the car, and we knew from prior experiences that the driver was a drug addict, none of that gave
us a good enough legal reason to search the car. In fact, even if we saw actual drugs in the car, we could not search without
consent or a warrant. That’s right we had to get a search warrant first. This was especially painful because in the old days we did
have the authority to search; we could (and did, all the time) order the driver out of the car, and we could search the whole
thing (except the locked glove box and trunk) and look under the seats, in the center console; everywhere, and recover the
drugs. Then the laws changed and to search a car required getting a judge to approve it, via a search warrant, which was several
pages of legal forms to fill out appropriately and then present to a judge. Not. Ever. Convenient.

When I went to Florida for my initial K9 training, the other officers there, all being from Southern states, were shocked and
horrified to hear me describe how Washington cops needed a search warrant to look in a car. Because in those southern states,
no warrant was needed. They could hardly believe what I was telling them, and they felt very sorry for me that I had to jump
through so many stupid legal hoops to do police work.

Later as the years went by, more and more restrictive rules were added to police work. For example, it became essentially illegal
for a K9 handler to bring his dog up to a front porch of a residence to sniff the front door seams to try and detect any odor of
drugs coming from inside the house. Because homeowners have privacy
rights, you know. That particular ruling caused a huge nationwide gasp
and face palm from every K9 handler, our general thought was that a
front porch, if it were accessible by, say, any random delivery man, or
girl scouts selling cookies, or door-to-door solicitors, then it must
certainly be okay for a police dog, too? But no.

Another sad example: phones became illegal to search. Even if a
criminal were running away from a crime scene and they intentionally
abandoned their phone and the police find it, we couldn’t just open it
up and start browsing. A search warrant would be required. Because,
you know…even criminals have rights.