Cook County Sheriff’s K-9 Unit Director Jerry Roman stayed mostly silent, preferring to highlight the K-9 unit’s human and animal officers during the Southwest News Herald’s interviews that shed light on the group’s astonishing abilities that enhance human crime solving.
Cook County Sheriff’s K-9 Unit dogs have tracked missing persons across five miles of Chicago streets, identified decomposed remains, and detected explosives and narcotics — abilities that human officers cannot replicate.
The Cook County Sheriff’s K-9 Unit, formed in 2018 by merging three separate units, now deploys bloodhounds, patrol dogs, a cadaver dog and comfort therapy dogs across the county. Their work has helped solve murders, locate missing persons, and provide closure to families — often in conditions and terrain where human officers alone would fail.
The unit’s K-9 patrol officers’ (tracking dogs) capabilities include human, narcotics, explosive, firearms and even electronics detection, like cell phones, one human remains detection dog specializing solely in decomposition scents, bloodhounds (trailing dogs) that find missing persons and suspects and comfort therapy dogs.
Origins of K-9 unit
K-9 patrol officers have been in existence since the 1950s and by 2018, three separate units were merged creating the Cook County Sheriff’s K-9 Unit under Cook County Sheriff, Tom Dart.
The bloodhound unit began spurred by two criminal cases the unit worked on, the 2007 murder of 5-year-old girl Melanie Beltran; the unit brought two people to justice and another case, the murder of 14-year-old Kelli O’Laughlin of Indian Head Park that Sheriff Dart, a former lawyer, prosecuted at the time.
“One of our bloodhounds got the person that killed her (O’Laughlin),” said bloodhound handler and unit Sgt. Anna Wilk.
The naming convention for K-9 officers is related to the unit’s work.
K-9 names are honorifics dedicated to the human beings, including children’s cases and murders of police officers the units worked on; some of the dogs have since retired.
Tracking versus trailing
Tracking K-9 officers are highly disciplined dual purpose dogs that follow exact “footstep to footstep” scents known as ground disturbance and are trained in finding people, narcotics or explosives, according to the National Police Dog Foundation.
Bloodhounds are single purpose trailing dogs that utilize three different scent capabilities; ground disturbance, exact footstep/hard surface and scent in the air, moving seamlessly between them when searching, according to “Trailing versus Tracking” by Jeff Schettler for Georgia K9 National Training Center.
K-9 patrol officer training.
“We do not force our dogs into a graduation,” Wilk said. “We make sure that the handler and the dog are confident with one another as a team. Our dual purpose narcotics dogs, they’re trained in a lot of things for tracking. Bloodhounds are trailing, our patrol dogs are tracking which is completely different; article searching, narcotics and people.”
Dual purpose patrol dogs receive obedience training while bloodhounds do not.
The reasons for patrol dog obedience training is due to the nature of their job.
“Obedience is a big part of dog training, right?” said Officer Nelson Louis. “When you have a dual purpose tracking dog that is trained in looking for drugs or apprehending a person, you want that dog to be more obedient to have more control over him.”
German and Belgian shepherd patrol officers begin training when more mature to instill discipline in them, he said.
Tracking K-9 patrol officers begin pre-training at approximately 1-year-old with the unit’s master trainer for six weeks. Once paired with his or her handler, another six weeks of training begins, she said.
Before they are allowed to work on the street, the team has to pass the North American Police Dog Training Certification.
Bloodhounds
Officer Joshua Johnson’s K-9 bloodhound partner, AJ, is named for 5-year-old victim, AJ Freund who the K-9 unit helped to find.
“Our bloodhounds are all single purpose dogs,” he said. “They only have one job and that’s to find people. The majority of calls we receive from our department along with other departments are for missing persons cases but we do criminal investigations as well.”
A scent article introduced to Johnson’s 109-pound partner is key to beginning a search.
“From an article of clothing, to gauze in a car seat, as long as we can get the scent of that person, it’s a good deployment to go on,” he said.
A K-9 unit trained Bloodhounds’ single purpose classification also means there is no limit to the distance the dog can smell, according to the officer.
“They are scent specific so when they are presented with the scent of that article, that’s the only scent they’re looking for,” Johnson said.
Bloodhounds can also identify, by scent, who has gone missing from a room, he said.
“If I walk away from this room, we can let the dog smell every person in a room or the chair I’m sitting on right now and they’ll know someone is missing and find me,” Johnson said. “If we didn’t have a scent article, they’re also capable of finding a person as well. They’ll know one person is not here.”
How finding starts
Typically, a last point of contact or observation is how a search begins but not always, according to Johnson.
“Sometimes it doesn’t always work like that,” he said. “We can start from a residence or a vehicle and the dogs will go. They will work until they can’t work anymore. If need be we can always use another dog to pick up where that dog left off.”
The officer and his K-9 partner have traveled miles and still found the person they were looking for, Johnson said.
Bloodhound trail distance
Sgt. Wilk’s longest trail to date is almost five miles in 87 degree summer heat, she said.
“We had an escape out of one of our courtrooms,” Wilk said. “We were able to get a scent article for that individual. We went to their last known location and that’s where I started through the inner city which is very, very difficult.”
“That’s why we have so many of us so we can help each other out,” she said. “Five miles is long in 87 degree weather. I started with a team of five people [with dogs] behind me. By the time we got to almost five miles there was only one other person with me that could trail. That’s because we’re fast. The dogs are guiding us so their speed is our speed.”
Bloodhounds in the city
Bloodhound teams work harder when called to duty in Chicago’s urban environment, said Wilk.
“We can control them,” she said. “We can slow them down, especially for red lights or traffic; we have to advocate for these dogs. We can start and stop them but we’re working off their speed. They’re hungry for their “find.” They want to find this individual so they’re going and they have a one track mind. It’s go, go, go,” she said.
Different weather conditions affect the ability of the dogs to find what they’re looking for.
“The best conditions would be a little moisture in the air, in the 60s with a light wind,” Wilk said. “That’s ideal for us.”
Cook County’s K-9 officers and partners work 12 months a year and are on call 24 hours a day.
Training bloodhounds
“Bloodhound training begins with the 8-week-old puppy stepping on its own ears and chasing trainers back and forth; it’s a game for the puppies at first, but it’s not a game because human lives are at stake,” said Wilk.
Single purpose bloodhound training starts earlier because they are not trained in obedience, said bloodhound handler, said Officer Nelson Louis.
“We just kind of want them to be wild and do their thing,” Louis said. “They’re naturals at hunting. Like down South, they use them for hunting animals and here we transition them over to human scent.”
Police and sheriff’s departments in the South also have bloodhounds, Louis said, noting the bloodhound teams go ‘down South’ to learn, do training and get certifications.
Bloodhound training graduation occurs in about one year, he said.
Bloodhound turn and time
As a bloodhound puppy progresses through its training, gets older and shows maturity by understanding more about the job it’s working toward, a turn and time is added, said Wilks.
Turn and time is a training method that becomes an integrated skill in a bloodhound and ultimately, used on the job.
Bloodhound training starts with one turn, then two, three, four turns, continually expanding on the time and distance, she said.
“People don’t walk in a straight line,” Wilk said. “It would be great if they did; we’d find everyone. People wander off or get lost and they take a turn here and a turn there. That dog has to follow that path.”
Pairing human and canine officers
Once K-9 officers receive training they are paired with their human officer where they receive advanced training, said Officer Louis whose partner is a bloodhound named Ella.
“The dogs already know what to do,” he said. “So, I think it’s more so training the officer.”
Training time is not pre-determined and certification happens when the officer and K-9 are ready.
“When I train with my dog, it’s me learning how to read her and her learning to read me, Louis said. “There’s times when she’ll look back at me like ‘Hey, why are you slowing me down? I know it’s this way and I want to go this way.’”
K-9 officer Ella is named for former Cook County Corrections officer and, later, Chicago Police Officer, Ella French, slain in the line of duty.
Officer Louis will slow his dog Ella, to avoid her running into traffic and getting hurt or going around a corner after an armed suspect, he said.
“She doesn’t know that,” Louis said. “She just wants to follow that scent.”
Scene response and K-9 capability
Cook County K-9 and human officers do not respond sooner than one hour after receiving a search call, Wilk said, noting that once the search begins, one hour is lost.
This allows for a crime scene to be secured to avoid contamination, according to the Kansas Department of Corrections’ K-9 Unit Guidelines.
Officer Johnson’s partner, AJ, the unit’s oldest bloodhound, is capable of “doing a trail” confidently from 24 hours to weeks old; a puppy would not be able to do what AJ can, said Sgt. Wilk.
Wilks’ oldest trail with her first dog was 8 months old, meaning the scent was embedded for that length of time.
“There’s a difference between fresh and embedded scent,” she said.
Masking scents with chemicals like bleach does not work.
“People have attempted to mask their own scent,” Wilk said. “But a bloodhound? They’ll figure it out. They know it’s bleach and they’re like, ‘wait, but what else is it?’”
Human Remains Detection dogs
“When you’re speaking about a dog that looks for bodies, that’s a cadaver dog,” said Sgt. Wilk. “We just got our first one last year and she’s been very successful thus far. They start training at 1-year-old using human remains that are donated to us when we’re training these dogs.”
Officer Christine Miller is the only officer to have a single purpose cadaver dog in the Cook County Sheriff’s department.
“Just like bloodhounds are single purpose trailers for living human scent, Darwin and I are single purpose for persons who are deceased focusing on decomposition odors,” she said.
As opposed to reuniting families [by locating someone], we reunite families by providing closure at the point of recovery and may seem sad to some people, Miller said.
The officers and K-9 partners
“Being a bloodhound handler is definitely a passion,” said Wilk. “You can hear the dogs barking right now. The four of us are on duty; it’s our actual training day today.”
Teams are always ready to deploy, she said, noting that training days always get a missing persons call.
“We get the pleasure of living with our partners,” Wilk said. “They are with us 24/7. We are with our dogs more than our families. The bond between a handler and their canine is something that cannot be broken.”
The dogs know officers’ voices, movements, scents and feelings indicating deep trust in human partners, she said.
“Especially with the patrol dogs,” she said. “You see how they look at their handlers. You can call their names and they don’t take their focus off mom or dad, Wilk said.
“All they want to do is make us happy at the end of the day,” said Officer Johnson.
In closing
At the end of the interviews, Director Roman focused on his human team.
Roman expressed pride in his teams while citing their continued work with their dogs to ensure readiness in any and all elements.
“I want to touch on how much training these guys do and the dedication this team has,” he said. “If it’s Christmas, night-time, super hot out or super cold, it doesn’t matter; these guys will deploy.”
Officer Michael Juraszek, bloodhound handler, took a moment to sum up the commitment of human K-9 officers and their partners.
Juraszek was asked,”If your loved one went missing, wouldn’t you want someone to go out and at least try to look for this person?”
“Of course,” he said. “And this is what our mission is. You never know when someone needs help. They call us and we never say ‘no’.”