Bloodhound handlers from law enforcement agencies across the state spent the past week in Havana, Florida. The seminar aimed at helping missing person teams improve responses.
The first image that comes to mind for a police dog is probably a German shepherd or a Belgian Malinois. Pointy-eared and dark-muzzled, fast and aggressive, they can be pretty intimidating. But they’re not the only dogs working law enforcement.
“How I describe it,” Steve Feaster begins, “when you see police dogs, you think of the German shepherds and the Malinois, and how they do in the detection work, I consider them sprinters.
“Bloodhounds are marathon runners,” he says.
Feaster is a sergeant in the Brevard County sheriff’s. He’s spending the week at the Florida Public Safety Institute as lead instructor in the bloodhound scent tracking seminar.”
Fourteen bloodhound handlers are attending the seminar this year. The program has been running for nine, and Feaster has been the lead instructor this year and the last. In a small classroom Thursday, he goes over the mock child abduction they ran the previous day.
“Yesterday was a horrible day to track,” Feaster says. “When you think about it, in the conditions that were out there yesterday—all that breeze, all those buildings, all those tree lines, all that traffic, all that carbon monoxide.”
“Man, I just put you in Satan’s den yesterday,” Feaster says.
The site of the practice run was a local shopping mall, and the task was no mean feat. The decoys—a woman and a boy—left the mall through the parking garage, circled around, got in a car, drove to the opposite end of the parking lot, ditched the car, walked through a wooded area, crossed a major thoroughfare, entered and left a couple of stores, crossed another road, circled another building and waited at a bench in front of the store.
“This day and age, statistics show that if you can find a missing kid in the first hour who’s been abducted you have a 70 to 80 percent success rate that the child’s unharmed,” Corporal Josh Creech says.
He’s from the Lake County Sheriff’s Department, and he’s one of the seminar’s instructors.
“You hit the three hour mark and it drops to [a] 20 percent chance,” Creech goes on. “Usually within a three hour time period, the child’s either severely hurt or killed, in a true abduction.”
“So yesterday, did well—they did it in two hours and one minute,” Creech says. “They located the mom and the child.”
In the parking lot after their morning briefing, the handlers start bringing out the dogs. One of the dogs is Titan—an eight month old male. His handler Jason Lewis from the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office, explains Titan’s playful but he knows when it’s time to go to work.
“As you see he’s got his normal collar around his neck. He knows once he’s hooked there it’s play time,” Lewis says. “Once I put his actual harness on and he feels that hook to his back, then he knows it’s time to work.”
And a moment later that’s exactly what Titan’s doing. One of the participants has left a gauze pad with his scent on it before running about a quarter mile off to hide.
As we get closer, Creech explains what Titan is doing.
“You see the dog, he’s weaving back and forth because he’s working the scent cone going from corner to corner knowing he’s right on track,” Creech says.
When a dog does something right you’re supposed to reinforce that behavior. Some dogs respond to treats, but Titan just likes to play.
Creech explains, “his ID should be a sit, he’ll smell the subject and he’ll sit.” But he’s interrupted by Lewis gleefully yelling “Good boy.” Titan’s mouth drops open and he rears up, to hug Lewis.
Back in the parking lot Titan starts playing with a tennis ball. But after a minute or two he’s dropped it, and he’s lunging up onto the tailgate of Lewis’s truck. Lewis explains he’s ready to get back to work.
