K-9 officers remind their police dogs of the fundamentals
</element><element id="paragraph-1" type="body"><![CDATA[The dogs were barking in Harrisburg Wednesday.
Some residents were scratching their heads after seeing all the police K-9 vehicles around town, at Whipper Johnson's gym and at the roundhouse area at the north end of Veterans Drive.
The gathering of K-9 officers was part of the twice-a-month training schedule of Southern Illinois police departments.
Sometimes the training crew involves as many as 10 officers and their dogs. Wednesday's involved six: Harrisburg Police Department, Illinois State Police District 13, Illinois State Police District 22, two officers from Mt. Vernon Police Department and one Richland County Sheriff's Deputy.
Harrisburg Officer Nathan Moore had set up three walls with a series of boxes or tubes attached to each. The boxes either contained narcotics or other substances and the dogs were to alert on those containing narcotics.
During the morning the dogs were at the weightlifting gym of Whipper Johnson -- also a Harrisburg Police Officer -- where they were training in building searches.
"We did building searches for apprehension training," Moore said.
A hide-and-go-seek game of sorts, the dogs would poke around through the building until they location the designated "bad guy."
After the narcotic sniffing exercises the dogs did some tracking by following the scent of one of the officers who was hiding in a grove of trees.
Then they did area search apprehension training, a specialized type of command that is rarely used, but is required.
In this scenario the officer hid in the tree grove wearing a bite sleeve. The dogs one at a time were ordered to search in the general direction to search for the "bad guy." The dogs would run, searching, and once they picked up the smell of a human would home in on him and grab the bite sleeve.
Moore said this technique would only be used in the case of a person fleeing police into a field or other secluded area -- never in the city streets because of the possibility the dog could apprehend the wrong suspect.
Moore said the training is especially good for reminding dogs of the fundamentals -- mainly drug searches.
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DeNeal receives e-mail at mailto:bdeneal@yourclearwave.com.</li>
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