An Unleashed Demand for Police Dogs

The man fired several shots and took off running. A witness jumped in shock, but Veith, a German shepherd accustomed to such mischief, charged after the fleeing gunman, snaring his arm in canine teeth.

And Veith wouldn’t let go until Capitol Police Officer Thomas Knoch ordered him to. It was only a demonstration, but it made the point: Veith is no docile house pet. He is a trained professional.

Such dogs suddenly seem to be everywhere. As fears of terrorism grew before the Persian Gulf War, four-legged inspectors showed up in force at the nation’s airports, sniffing luggage for explosives.

More people called police when they noticed objects that they might once have ignored--a lone briefcase or box--and bomb-sniffing dogs often showed up at the side of responding officers.

It was the fear of terrorism that convinced the Capitol Police to put all 24 of their German shepherds on full-time duty at the U.S. Capitol, ready to alert handlers to bombs or merely look threatening.

“Dogs are a great deterrent,” said Officer Dan Nichols.

Nationwide, some 10,000 dogs work for civilian law enforcement, said Samuel G. Chapman, a political science professor at the University of Oklahoma at Norman who has studied the issue for 30 years.

About 8,000 are all-purpose patrol dogs, many of which are cross-trained to sniff out explosives, narcotics, or incendiary materials used by arsonists, said Chapman. The rest are trained only for the nose work.

Dogs are never trained to search for both narcotics and explosives because narcotics dogs often paw at the contraband they find, experts said. Pawing at bombs could be disastrous.

The military has about 2,200 dogs, all of them trained at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas. All are trained for patrol duties, and virtually all also learn to detect drugs or bombs.

Some were assigned to duty in the Persian Gulf, although the exact number was classified, said Col. Richard Hetzel, commander of the Department of Defense Military Working Dog Agency.

Their duties in the battle zone also were not publicized, but there have been reports that they helped guard Iraqi prisoners of war.

Law enforcement and military dogs of choice are German shepherds and a breed that looks similar, Belgian malinois. Those popular for “nose-work” include Labrador retrievers, golden retrievers and beagles, a dog small enough to climb into an aircraft tail, Hetzel said.

The agency that most wants bomb-sniffing dogs, Hetzel said, is the Federal Aviation Administration, the one non-military agency for which Lackland trains dogs.

“Most of the animals coming through right now are narcotics, because of the volume of narcotics,” Hetzel said during a recent interview.

And they seem to be having some effect. “The use of drug-detecting dogs has proved to be a cost-effective way to increase the efficiency of our enforcement efforts,” says the Bush Administration’s latest national drug control strategy.

The Customs Service says its 218 drug dog teams on duty last year made almost 3,300 seizures of illicit drugs and $39.7 million in currency. The drug detections included 61,000 pounds of marijuana, 13,200 pounds of cocaine, 204 pounds of heroin and 76 pounds of opium. The number of such teams increased to 241 as of Feb. 1, said Kathy Hamor of Customs.

The Administration wants $3.5 million next year to renovate and expand Customs’ training facility.

Among other things, the renovation “would give us the capability to provide a more realistic training environment,” said Chuck Caldwell, director of the facility. “If you want to search a car, you have to have a car.”

Nearly as important as training are the dogs themselves--and how they look.

“We don’t want a dog that looks like it’s going to be friendly,” said Nichols of the Capitol Police. “We don’t want people coming up and petting the dog.

“We want people to remember that these are first and foremost police dogs.”