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02/04/2020 02:50 PMHepburn, the newest member of Connecticut State Police Troop F in Westbrook, has been on the job only a few weeks. She is lively, friendly, and likes to chew up cardboard boxes—and is serious about sniffing out narcotics.
Hepburn is a 15-month-old yellow Lab. She and her handler, Trooper Joseph O’Connell, are members of the State of Connecticut’s narcotics detection training’s 209th graduating class, which consisted of seven teams of handlers and dogs.
Police canines are trained for various purposes, including sniffing out bombs, tracking missing people, controlling crowds, even picking up the scent of electronic devices. The work of the Connecticut State Police’s K-9 unit was established in 1934 and is world-renowned, said O’Connell.
As for Hepburn, her specialty is recognizing and alerting O’Connell to the particular odors of illegal drugs. The 12-week training program began with the K-9 training team “imprinting” the dogs with those scents over a period of six weeks using pure, unfiltered narcotics samples provided by the state police forensics lab.
Training Dogs and Humans
O’Connell and the other handlers arrived after the imprinting process was complete. The human curriculum included mastering handling techniques and learning about law, physical science, and canine psychology, behavior, and incredible sense of smell.
“The...odor kind of wafts out in a cone shape,” O’Connell explained. “The molecules get further apart, so depending on whether the A/C is running or the heat is running or the windows are open, the wind is blowing, that scent cloud can move about the room.
“We learned about thermodynamics,” he continued, “how air moves and scent moves and why it does, hot air rises in cold—and if you begin to understand that, you can see what [Hepburn’s] behavior is. If she enters the scent cone, you see she immediately changes [her behavior]: Her nose will come up, her tail may stop wagging, her cheeks will puff, and there’s sniffing through the nose, in and out, rapidly.”
The dog might move out of the scent cone but will move back in, eventually narrowing in on the odor’s source: This is called bracketing. That’s when the dog gives a primary alert: She sits close to where the scent is coming from and looks at her handler.
“If I have her on lead and she alerts, I continue to walk past her, and I may even [tug a little on the lead] to try to pull her away from it,” O’Connell said. “We did that in training to make sure she’s committed to the odor.”
At this point, Hepburn must be paid.
“I’ll have a little food bag,” he said. “I...grab a few kibbles of food, and give her a happy ‘Yes,’ pay her, and then I’ll say, ‘Show me.’ She will sniff back at the source, come to another seated position...I’ll pay her. And then happy tones: ‘Good girl. Good job.’ And that’s what she lives for.”
The desire for food is “a natural urge in every living thing—you don’t have to develop that in them,” he continued. “And when you kind of hold the food back, the drive is very strong. So we kept her weight down a little bit during the academy to keep her drive up.”
Sensitive Noses
Dogs can detect those imprinted scents even when other odors are present.
“[W]hen you walk into a neighbor’s home and...there’s a big pot of stew on the stove, you’ll walk in there and say, ‘Ah, beef stew,’” O’Connell said. “You bring [Hepburn] in the kitchen, she’s going to smell gravy, salt, pepper, onions, beef—all the ingredients. She’ll be able to separate them.”
Transporters of illegal drugs try to mask the drugs’ odors using dryer sheets, coffee, or more elaborate techniques.
“They’ll take, let’s say, some cocaine, they’ll wrap it hundreds of times, bag it, Ziploc, tape it...put it inside a plastic tube, seal it, and then they’ll slip it inside the gas tank, under gasoline,” he said. “Or there are welded, sealed compartments in their vehicle. They’ll pull up the carpets and you’ll have a little storage bin underneath in the back of an SUV...They’ll put a false floor in there and then conceal narcotics. And they’ll weld it shut.
“Everything is permeable,” he continued. “So if you’re transporting heroin or cocaine...the gases given off by these narcotics will permeate. It may take some time the better wrapped they are, but oftentimes when you transport across the country...the dogs will eventually find it.
“It’s mind boggling to think about how sensitive these noses are,” he added.
Varied and Ongoing Training
During the training, the handlers traveled across the state with their dogs, the variety of locations and circumstances designed to expose the dogs to different noises, smells, and temperatures, explained O’Connell.
“We’ve trained in locker rooms,” he said. “We’ve trained in abandoned buildings. We went to a fire station and searched vehicles...and lockers.”
O’Connell continues the training with small tins of narcotics issued to him by the forensics lab. Every day, he feeds Hepburn as part of this training process, hiding the tins in various locations and waiting until she finds them to reward her with kibble.
“And then every time we go to recall training, which is quarterly, we are going to take the narcotics issued to me...and reweigh them, make sure it’s the same amount, and they may issue me some different narcotics,” he said.
Each year, he and Hepburn will be required to be recertified by a forensic scientist at the lab, he said.
For now, Hepburn is his partner and constant companion, traveling with him in a specially equipped SUV, living with O’Connell and his wife, and playing a bit too roughly with Louie, their elderly shih tzu.
“[I]t’s hard to separate working dog from a member of the family,” O’Connell said. “[M]y kids are grown, but through social media and sharing photographs, they love her, too.”