SPECIAL REPORT: Drug-sniffing police K-9s

For years, they’ve been fighting crime side by side with police officers on the streets of Salinas.

Now, the Salinas Police Department is getting some backup to sniff out drugs in Monterey County.

Salinas police said it’s been about five or six years since the department has had its own drug-sniffing dogs and now the department has two new four-legged members of the team.

“Find it, where is it? Show me!”

KION was there as the department’s new K-9s, Oakley and Keno, tried to track down drugs inside the KION-TV building as part of some maintenance training.

“He’s taking in all the smells. If the person had a pizza, he’s going to smell all the smells and differentiate from those smells what he’s looking for,” said Officer Carlos Rios.

Oakley was up first looking for the drugs.

“What we have here is heroin that was taken off the streets. I don’t remember what case, but we seized it as evidenc,e and it was released to us, and this is one of our training aids,” Rios explained.

Officer Rios hid the drugs in the couch. “Some dogs will eat the drugs so we try to put it in a location where they can smell it, but it’s not easily accessible to them where it might be dangerous.”

Oakley made his way around the room before sniffing out the heroin.

“That’s a good boy!” said Officer Zach Dunagan.

“Their reward is their toy. He looks forward to hunting drugs because he gets his toy!”

So how do the officers know when their dog has found the drugs?

“You saw when he put his nose on the cushion. He sat, and that’s a good indication there are narcotics there because he is trained in four specifics, heroin, meth, Ecstasy and cocaine,” said Dunagan.

Dunagan, with the Violence Suppression Task Force, said dogs may not always sit, so an officer really just looks for a change in his dog’s behavior.

“Sometimes they claw because they can’t get to it. So it’s odd for him to smell furniture to shove his nose somewhere. Dogs don’t like doing that. They aren’t like cats. They can get their heads stuck somewhere, so when he does an odd behavior, his different breathing pattern, his tail wagging- so when he is happy, his tail just wags a little bit, but when he is in odor, when he’s trying to find what he’s hunting for, his tail wags a bit more,” explained Dunagan.

Unlike Oakley, K-9 Keno doesn’t just look for drugs.

“He is trained to apprehend suspects. He is trained to find them, and if we need to search for drugs, we’ll search for drugs, but his main purpose is to apprehend suspects,” said Rios.

Rios said sometimes just having Keno on the streets on patrol and the criminals hearing his bark is enough for suspects to give up.

“His bark, I’m not going to say is worse than his bite, because I think his bite is pretty bad, too, but just having him out here gives the other officers reassurance, and it is just an additional tool for our rapidly evolving situations.”

And that’s what both officers say is most important. Their K-9s are helping protect police and the community.

“It’s great for our Violence Suppression Task Force to have a narcotics-sniffing dog because, like it says in our name, violence is kind of tied to drugs for the most part, whether it be gangs or just drugs on the street, so it is a big portion of our task force is trying to stop narcotic sales in Monterey County as a whole, so it’s been great so far, and hopefully its many more years to come,” Dunagan said.

“For me, it has been the most rewarding. He is a tool to supplement patrol, but he’s also my partner, and we get to go home at night, that’s great. He loves to work, and he wants to work every day,” Rios said.

Dunagan said his lab, Oakley, used to hunt ducks before he started hunting drugs. He ended up being too big and slow for duck hunting.

Keno came all the way from the Czech Republic.

With the addition of the new drug-sniffing dogs, Salinas PD doesn’t have to depend on other agencies for resources.