Riverside School Trains Dogs to Take a Bite Out of Crime

San Diego Police Officer Rick Widner knelt at the entrance to a cave where a robbery suspect was hiding, turned to his new partner and said “Plaats!”

His partner, Benno--a police dog that Widner calls an “alligator with fur”--immediately responded to the Dutch command for “sit at heel.”

“This is the San Diego police! Come out or I’ll send the dog in!” Widner shouted.

Failing to get a response, Widner uttered the word for “search,” and the 80-pound Malinois bolted into the darkness. Seconds later, Widner heard the muffled sound of his dog barking and the cries of the suspect he had cornered.

The “arrest” was actually a training exercise at Adlerhorst International, near Glen Avon in Riverside County. It is the largest private police dog-handler training school in the world.

More than 80 law enforcement agencies throughout the nation use dogs trained at Adlerhorst. These agencies include the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, Orange County Sheriff’s Department and police departments in San Diego, Santa Ana, Ventura, West Covina and Downey. The dogs are trained to ignore gunfire at close range and to bypass a raw steak to track down the scent of heroin.

Adlerhorst specializes in teaming officers and dogs. Partnerships are based on personality profiles provided by each officer. The school uses mostly 2-year-old German shepherds and Malinois that are pretrained in Europe and, therefore, respond to Dutch or German commands that must be learned by their American handlers.

As partners, a handler and his dog train together in a 120-hour program that some have compared to military boot camp. In training, handlers learn to “read” their dog’s behavior and anticipate the animal’s moves. The dogs become unerringly loyal to their handlers.

The school favors the so-called “search-and-bark” method, in which the dog locates and then corners a suspect until its handler arrives. The dogs bite a suspect only if he runs or attacks the handler.