Cop Dog : Charly the Crime-Fighting Canine Wins High Praise in Simi

Caught in the whirl of police lights, the man lingered menacingly close to the gun in the opened door of the motor home.

He had just led officers on a 25-minute chase across Simi Valley and now, cornered in an industrial park, he threatened to go out in a gunfight.

Police waited, revolvers drawn.

But the crucial weapon that December night was one that Officer Sterling Johnson could just as easily have left with his 2-year-old son--a German shepherd police dog.

As the 31-year-old man made his move, Johnson unleashed his longhaired partner and watched as the dog dashed through the blaze of headlights and knocked the suspect to the asphalt.

The next morning, sober and recovering from bites in the arm and leg, the man told his jailer, “I’ve got to tell you something. That dog really saved my life.”

“The guy was lucky I was there,” Johnson added.

And, in a way, he was lucky, too, said the Simi Valley police officer.

“It’s not like the movies. . . . If you shoot somebody, whether you kill them or not, you live with it your entire career.”

Canine units, long used for searches and subduing suspects, have come under fire in some Southern California communities in recent years because of bite wounds.

But in Simi Valley, statistically the nation’s safest city, the two-man, two-dog detail is alive and well--and eager to grow.

“It’s good, excellent,” Mayor Greg Stratton said of community support for the detail.

Businesses, civic leaders, even schoolchildren have weighed in, and not just with words. A donation fund--augmented with about $3,000 from the Rotary Club of Simi Sunrise on June 20 and $150 from the children of Crestview Elementary School on June 14--has been set up by the City Council to help bring in a third canine team, Police Capt. Jerry Boyce said.

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He said it should cost about $12,000 for the team. The car would be extra.

“You often find that the public has a great deal of suspicion of the use of police dogs,” Police Chief Willard R. Schlieter said. “But I’ve not found that to be true here.”

One reason might be Johnson. Solidly built, with an impish glint to his eye, the 49-year-old father of seven alternately cuts the figure of a favorite uncle or a no-nonsense drill sergeant, depending upon the need.

His partner, Charly von der Dorstener Grenze, is an apt match. At one moment a 98-pound bolt of fangs, at the next a playmate for Johnson’s 2-year-old son, Charly is as much a boon to Johnson as a curse to criminals.

“It’s a deterrent you cannot believe,” Johnson said while on Sunday-night patrol with Charly.

“Cross-trained,” as Johnson put it, Charly belongs to a select group of police dogs that can do both narcotics detection and patrol work. The other Simi Valley canine, Max, whose handler is Officer Dwight Thompson, is similarly trained.

Together, these dogs and their predecessors have seen it all, Johnson said. They have found missing children and even a lost Alzheimer’s patient. They have searched buildings, shown off their skills to the public, sniffed out drugs and helped control crowds.

They also have defused potentially lethal confrontations, as Johnson’s canine did that night in 1989, when the dog stopped the man just paces from the .357 magnum in his motor home.

“And yet,” Johnson added, a canine is “a weapon that does not do that much damage” to suspects.

The outcome of the chase involving Rodney King could have been quite different, for example, if Charly had been there, Johnson ventured.

“Our dogs are trained to never go to the head or the neck,” he said. “You’re going to get a whole lot of people disagreeing with me, but think about it. When they see a dog, suspects often comply.”

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At least that is the experience in Simi Valley, Lt. Dick Thomas said--there have been thousands of arrests since the canine program began in 1977, yet few bites. Only three were reported last year and none so far this year, he said.

Lt. Don Austin, who supervises the canine units, gave part of the credit to the department’s “find and alert” tactic.

Simi Valley’s dogs--and those used by the Ventura, Santa Paula and Port Hueneme police departments, as well as the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department--are trained to attack suspects only when provoked or ordered directly, Johnson said. Otherwise, they bark.

The alternative tactic--”find and hold”--essentially teaches dogs to attack immediately, said Lt. Thomas, a department spokesman. This is more appropriate in high-crime areas, he added, because more suspects there might be armed and prone to resistance.

That distinction, however, is dismissed by some critics of the widespread use of police dogs.

“The whole notion that you can expect the dog to know when to attack or not to attack is . . . absurd,” said attorney Donald Cook, whose Los Angeles law office of Cook & Mann represents canine-bite plaintiffs throughout Southern California.

While conceding the value of dogs “as searching tools,” Cook objects to their wider police use on two counts. “Number one, the dogs end up being used as a tool of punishment, and two, cops end up having the dogs do what they know they couldn’t do.”

Cook added, “You cannot delegate to the dog a human decision as to when force is appropriate. . . . The (find and alert) policy purports to do just that, to transfer the responsibility to the dog.”

Johnson, however, said the responsibility ultimately rests with the suspect and not the dog. Resist, make a quick movement, and the dog might attack, he admitted, but he added: “Bites are bad only when a suspect fights.”

On a recent Saturday night, he and Charly were trolling an industrial park for prowlers, vandals, anybody suspicious, when a call crackled over the cruiser’s radio. Johnson acknowledged and gunned the engine. Charly began to pace in the back seat. He wagged his tail. He whined.

“When the red lights go on,” Johnson said, “he knows something’s going on: ‘Dad’s going to need me.’ ”

And Johnson should know. As do other trainers, he cares for Charly 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Each day alone and once a week with other canine teams from other Ventura County agencies, they train.

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Charly even lives with Johnson and his family, as does the officer’s retired canine partner, Atlas.

Both dogs also have excelled in police canine competitions. One reason, in addition to countless hours of work, Johnson said, is they have become the “beta” to his “alpha.”

He has become their pack leader, in other words, and all others who populate the world--fellow officers, thugs, a reporter--”are just there,” Johnson added delicately. It is he, not Charly, who is “top dog.”

But there is one exception. Johnson, named 1994 officer of the year by his colleagues in Simi Valley, said: “You can get a dog to do anything except to use his nose.” That depends on the dog’s mood.

Luckily for Johnson that Saturday night--and unluckily for a 21-year-old Agoura Hills man and his 14-year-old brother--Charly was in the mood.

As Johnson pulled to a stop in an older subdivision, Charly whimpered eagerly. Another officer had stopped a battered Mazda RX-7. Seated on the curb, holding each other, were the brothers.

In the harsh glare of headlights, the two watched distractedly as Johnson led Charly into the back seat of the car, then the passenger area, then the hood, the hubcaps, then the driver’s side.

There, barely visible in a vial stuffed down the map pocket of the door, the dog sniffed out what police suspected was a trace of marijuana residue.