Law With Teeth

Talk about a bare-bones budget.

Land rich but cash poor, Cal State officials have decided to launch a police force at Ventura County’s budding four-year university with a couple of officers who are willing to work for food.

Meet Lucky and Jano, two canine cops imported from Germany to patrol the sprawling university campus under development at the shuttered Camarillo State Hospital.

As such, they represent the first students at the university, currently halfway through an intensive four-week boot camp to learn to sniff out trouble and take a bite out of crime.

And ultimately, when the first phase of the campus opens next September, the canines will register a cost savings for the Cal State system, providing an extra set of eyes and ears for university police officers at a fraction of the cost of their human counterparts.

“The primary function of our dogs in the first year or so is to be our partners and our protectors,” said veteran Police Officer Greg Mallen, so far the only non-canine member of the Cal State Channel Islands Police Department.

“Because we are so limited in our resources and personnel, these dogs are going to be of tremendous help to us,” he added. “To be honest, in certain situations, it’s like having five or six guys behind you.”

Channel Islands will be one of only three campuses in the Cal State University system where police dogs are deployed. The other two are San Francisco State and San Jose State, where Channel Islands President Handel Evans used to be top dog among humans.

With the Camarillo campus spread across 630 acres, CSU officials set out earlier this year to help university officers patrol the grounds and secure the 1.3 million square feet of buildings on the old hospital property.

“We’ve got this tremendous need to make sure we’ve got the area secured on the one hand, and on the other hand, we’ve got an extremely limited budget,” said Channel Islands project manager Noel Grogan.

Only five officers are to be hired this year, he said.

“We would need 15 officers to completely provide security for all these buildings,” Grogan said. “We’ll be able to cover three or four times as much area with a dog and an officer.”

Every Tuesday, Ventura County’s fledgling Cal State campus goes to the dogs.

Nearly 20 police dogs and their handlers from law enforcement agencies across the county gather at the site for a program run by trainer Debbie Inglis.

With her husband, David, who heads the Ventura Police Department’s canine program, Inglis has been training police dogs for about 15 years. The couple also run a police dog academy through which most local law enforcement agencies recruit rookie dogs and have them trained to sniff out drugs and go out on patrol.

It was the Inglises that Cal State officials called when they got the idea to put police dogs on the Channel Islands campus.

It turned out to be a natural fit. Through an earlier agreement with university officials, the couple already were holding weekly training sessions and running the police dog academy at the Channel Islands campus.

For $7,000 a dog, the couple imported two German shepherds--a 2-year-old named Jano (pronounced Yah-no) and 14-month-old Lucky--and started putting them through the paces two weeks ago.

“My job is to take people who have a police background and these dogs that have a natural bloodline that gives them a talent for this work and make them work as a team,” said Debbie Inglis, who before finding a place on the Cal State campus held the academy and weekly training sessions in city parks and other open spaces.

The job is twofold. One part is to train the dogs in everything from tracking to building searches. The other is to match the dogs with handlers, officers chosen to enter this specialized world of police work.

For the Channel Islands police department, Mallen, 46, was matched with Jano. And although not yet officially a member of the university police department, 27-year-old Michael Shuler was partnered with Lucky.

“This is what I’ve wanted to do my whole career,” said Shuler, who along with Mallen used to work for the state hospital’s police department.

After the hospital shut down in July of last year, the two stayed on to patrol the facility, hoping it would be reborn as a university where they could land law enforcement jobs.

“I have just always loved dogs, so it seemed natural to become a canine officer,” Shuler said. “I couldn’t be happier they selected me.”

Of course, there are some days he’s happier than others.

Both dogs are friendly and smart, picking up most of the training with ease. But when it came time one recent afternoon for them to sprint some distance to their handlers and stop on a dime directly in front of them, Shuler was not sure Lucky was ready.

The officers had been preparing for the exercise by getting the dogs to run a shorter distance and rewarding them by giving them pieces of wiener the officers had tucked in their mouths.

“Lucky won’t do five feet, let alone 50 yards,” Shuler told Inglis.

“Oh, don’t be so sure,” she replied.

Sure enough, with Shuler calling him, the coal-black shepherd was off like a shot, racing toward his master at full speed. But he pulled up in time, sitting at Shuler’s feet and looking up for some reward. What Lucky got was a whole lot of praise, which seemed to suit him just fine.

“We’ve been working with their stomachs--now we’re working with their brains,” Shuler said, cooing to his dog.

If everything goes according to schedule, Lucky and Jano will graduate from the academy Oct. 9. They will receive official Cal State University police department badges and be on hand when the inaugural phase of the university opens next year for the fall semester.

“It will be a historic moment,” said Mallen, who started working for the state hospital’s police department in 1985. “It affected a lot of lives when the hospital shut down. But the rebirth as a university is bringing a lot of good things, and the dogs are just tools to help bring about those good changes.”