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Two
Seminars Planned for May and June in North Carolina
The first seminar is a
certification seminar being sponsored by Forsyth County Technical
Community College and the Forsyth County Sheriff’s Department. The
seminar will be held on May 10, 11, 12, 2004 in Winston-Salem, North
Carolina. The seminar is free to any ESWDA member and membership is
available at the time of the seminar. Hotel arrangements are with the
Super 8 Motel, 200 Mercantile Drive, Winston-Salem, NC. (336) 714-8888,
and dogs are WELCOME in the rooms. The room rate for the hotel is $58.39
plus tax. Make sure you mention ESWDA when making the reservations. For
registration or further information contact Rick Rumley at rrumley@eswda.org
or he can be reached at (336) 399-6506. This spring seminar is an annual
event and always promises to be a good time with some good training thrown
into the mix.
The seminar that is being
offered in June is being sponsored by the Western Piedmont Community
College, Morganton, North Carolina and the Burke County Sheriffs
Department. The dates are June 7, 8 and 9, 2004. Some of the topics that
this seminar will cover are: Advanced Urban K-9 Tracking, Advanced
Narcotics Detection Techniques, and Street Survival Techniques with K-9.
Certificates of participation and attendance will be awarded upon the
completion of this seminar. Due to the generosity of the Western Piedmont
Community College there will be no charge for the seminar and ESWDA
membership is not required. However, attendance is limited to (25) twenty
five K-9 teams and is filling up fast. You must be an active law
enforcement officer to attend this seminar. Hotel arrangements for the
June seminar are at the Days Inn of Morganton, Morganton, North Carolina.
Their phone number is (828) 433-0011. The room rate is $36.0 per night and
dogs are welcome in the rooms. Make sure you mention that you are
attending a K-9 seminar to get the discounted rate.
For further information
or registration information on the June seminar, please contact Steve
Warren, Director of Law Enforcement Training at Western Piedmont College
at (828) 438-6118 or e-mail at swarren@wpcc.edu
.
Possible Seminar in Florida is
Being Discussed.
The Eastern States Working Dog Association is
currently negotiating with several community colleges in Florida on the
possibility of having a seminar there. Many of our Florida members have
expressed an interest is hosting a seminar. As soon as our plans are
finalized we will announce the dates, times and locations of the seminars.
Record Keeping for Maintenance
Training of a Detection Dog
By Stephen B. Phillips
New York State Coordinator
Eastern States Working Dog Association
Recently, Detection Dog trainers and handlers have been under fire from
many different angles. We are seeing the defense lawyers in drug cases
routinely hiring Expert witnesses, some of whom are current trainers and
handlers, and some of whom are the PhD type intellectuals who have little
or no practical experience but plenty of book knowledge. We have been getting
a lot of bad press as well as court decisions that are negatively
affecting
the work we try to do.
There have been several points that have been attacked recently, as
evidenced by the 60 Minutes segment and the articles that followed called
“Does The Nose Know” which is currently on the CBS website at
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/05/60minutes/main591477.shtml
. One is the fact that there is no Nationally recognized certification, as
in one
standard that is followed by all certifying associations. The Eastern
States Working Dog Association standards are tougher than most, with no
misses allowed, and also the fact that many of the certifications are good
for only six months. Some organizations still allow certifications to be
valid from two years. Another bone of contention is the fact that many K-9
handlers do not keep good records of maintenance training and deployment.
Many years ago, The DEA’s Head Counsel, Richard Madema, wrote a guide
for
detection dog handlers called Maximizing Scent Evidence. In it, he
outlined
several points of what should be included in all the maintenance training
records. Some of the more important things are often overlooked by K-9
handlers that he suggested. Here is a brief summery of what he thought
should be included to give the K-9 and handler the best chance of the
evidence they provided from being tossed in a court case:
*Date
*Who was at the training session
*Who
designed the problems for training
*who hid the target substances
*type of target substance
*amount of target substances
*Exact location of hide of target substance
*time hidden
*time searched
*results (successful or unsuccessful)
*comments (that would impact the search or performance of the K-9 or
handler)
I also include weather conditions, air currents, proof of residual odor,
and anything else that might have affected the search. Another good point
in the guide is that you should not note a false indication unless you are
absolutely sure that’s what you had, and that a dog hitting on residual
odor
has made a “non-seizure alert”. I believe this guide is still
available
from the DEA at this point, and if you can’t find it there, you can
always
check out Herb Mullican’s website Special Canine Services at
http://www.dogmaster.us/ . For
those of you not familiar with Herb, he has
the biggest data base of articles, books, military info ect. That is
available anywhere. If it was published, he has it or knows how to get it.
One thing that the head of US Customs told me was that they only keep
their
maintenance training records for a limited amount of time. If you have 90
days worth of maintenance training records, then throw out the first page
every time you add a new page, you have more than enough, if it is coupled
with certification, to show the performance record of your dog. If you
have
all your records from the last five years, you are opening yourself and
your
dog up to criticism and possible attack by a defense lawyer who has hired
an
expert to go over all your paperwork.
So, in reality, I take what I believe to be a sound idea from several
different sources to compile my own training records, and that is what I
pass along to my handlers. The big thing is to document what really
happened in the training sessions. If the dog missed a find, document it,
then document the corrective actions you took to correct the problem to
the
point the problem has disappeared. If the dog false alerted, write it
down,
and show the steps you used to correct the problem. If an expert witness
looks through your training records and sees a rosy report that shows the
dog is 100% all the time, be assured you will fall under attack.
Also, the last point I’d like to bring up is the K-9 “lingo” we all
seem to
use. Much of it has been “borrowed” from behavioral scientists and
applied
to dog training. We all know that if there is a problem with a K-9 going
to
trained final response on a non-target odor that we have a problem. For
instance, if the dog is going to trained final response on baggies (which
happened to one dog that was at the North Carolina seminar). We can easily
spot the problem; the dog is associating the odor of the plastic along
with
the odor of the drug, and is sitting or scratching at both. So we have to
EXTINCT the problem odor. We know what is meant by extincting the problem
odor, but a jury does not. We all have a tendency to throw around other
behavioral terms as well. Titration comes to mind. It was used on a post
on another chat group, and if you asked three different people on the
group
what it meant, you’d get three different answers. Now imagine you, a
lowly
K-9 handler is on the stand and you have a PhD in behavioral science
asking
the questions!!! Is he going to be able to trip you up? Undoubtedly! Are
you going to be able to “out explain” him? No way! Can he make you
look
foolish, unprepared and unprofessional to the jury? You bet if you’re
not
prepared! The point of all this is to get you to think about what you say
and think about what you write in your training log. You don’t have to
throw in terms like that to impress anyone. No one expects you to be a
behavioral scientist. Say what you have to say in plain English. Write it
down that way too. That way, you’re not arming the defense.
In closing, I’d like to say that many of the incidents that have gotten
us
all bad press recently, deserved on their own to get bad press. Look at
the
Goose Creek incident last year (not the first one from Texas). Look at the
Russ Ebersol case. Did they deserve to be singled out as poor examples of
how things should be done? Yes they did! Unfortunately, for every case
like that, we have to be more vigilant in doing what we do correctly.
Otherwise, we will find ourselves being even more tied down in case law
than
we are at present.
TRAINING
RECORDS SHOULD ALWAYS BE MAINTAINED IN ACCORDANCE WITH AGENCY POLICY AND
PROSECUTOR REQUIREMENTS.
Free On-Line Courses for Law
Enforcement
The
Mutlijurisdiction Counterdrug Task Force Training Program based in Florida
in conjunction with St. Petersburg College are offering free on-line
courses to law enforcement officers who are interested in drug
interdiction and related subjects.
Check
out their website at www.mctft.com for
further information.
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