K-9 Annie's a whiz at sniffing out drugs
By Leslie Slape of Town News
Thursday, June 1, 2006 6:52 AM PDT
Cowlitz County's newest sheriff's deputy, K9 Annie, had barely been on the job a week when she sniffed out a huge amount of cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine during a May 25 search warrant of a Kelso apartment.
"In her first week on the job she found more drugs than I have in my whole career," said Annie's handler, Deputy Jennifer Prusa, who has been with the sheriff's office 12 years.
Annie, a 3-year-old Australian cattle dog, is trained to identify the presence of four kinds of narcotics: meth, cocaine, heroin and marijuana. Her duties differ from fellow K9 deputy, Nitro, a patrol dog who wears a bulletproof vest and tracks suspects.
Prusa researched the need for a narcotics dog and prepared a proposal for the Cowlitz County commissioners.
"Cowlitz County has a critical drug problem right now," she said. "The drug dog is an amazing tool for law enforcement because their nose is 10,000 times stronger than a human. They have the ability to smell drugs where we wouldn't. And a trained drug dog can be used as probable cause for a search warrant."
The commissioners gave the sheriff's office about $2,000 for the six-week training program, meals and other expenses. Annie herself was purchased with a $500 donation from a fund created by Bishop's Bail Bonds and the Longview Kiwanis Club, longtime supporters of law enforcement K9 programs.
"Kiwanis, retail merchants and citizens all contributed to the fund at Bank of America," Holly Bishop said. "100 percent goes out to law enforcement in the county."
The fund previously purchased Reno, now retired, and Bruno, both for Longview Police.
Australian cattle dogs, also known as Queensland heelers, blue heelers or red heelers, are known for their toughness, trainability, intelligence and problem-solving skills.
They're also constantly on the move, if Annie is typical of the breed.
"She's an absolute ball of fire," Sheriff Bill Mahoney said. "She's just the most fun little dog to be around. She and Jen have bonded quite well. It's fun to watch them go to work."
Annie is the first narcotics-detection dog to work for the sheriff's office. Before her arrival, local drug-detection work was done by Longview K9 Bruno, who is cross-trained in patrol and narcotics detection. A Washington State Patrol narcotics K9 formerly assigned to this area was transferred to another part of the state six or seven months ago.
"Having Annie on board is a huge plus for us," Mahoney said. "We certainly expect to find a lot more narcotics-related items while using the dog --- plus it should save extensively on manpower and time. It might take us three or four hours to search a car that a dog can search in a few moments."
Last week's search of the Kelso apartment is a good example, Capt. Mark Nelson said. Without Annie, detectives would still have found the heroin, cocaine and meth, but it would have taken longer.
"She went in and boom! right to it," Nelson said. "It saved everybody a lot of time and a lot of effort."
Wednesday afternoon, Prusa hid a packet containing 9 grams of meth in a large room and let Annie sniff around. As soon as she found the meth Annie sat down and fixed her gaze on Prusa.
"The only time she's sitting still is when she's found drugs," said Prusa, rewarding Annie with a tennis ball.
Mahoney, a former K9 handler, said Prusa and Annie will be on call 24 hours a day, on top of Prusa's regular patrol duties. He predicted a spike in Prusa's workload that eventually will taper off.
"Now she's going to be listening to the radio, looking for opportunities to deploy the dog, and the other guys will be listening, too," he said. "She will get requests from other agencies. It's something she just has to adjust for. But she's already a very tenacious, hardworking cop."
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