Orland Park’s newest member of the police force sniffed and sniffed and sniffed and sniffed on Oct.19 in the board room at village hall.
Joie, the village’s new bloodhound, found a lot of friendly faces and pats on the head at the board’s Committee of the Whole meeting.
Deputy Chief Larry Rafferty and Officer Kyle Jachim introduced Joie to the board and after vigorous sniffing, she got up on her hind legs and greeted a few members of the board, including Mayor James Dodge.
“(Police chief Eric Rossi) and I sat down two years ago, and we talked about introducing a bloodhound into Orland Park,” Rafferty said. “Most of it was based on need.
“We’re looking at a community of 60,000 people, tons and tons of businesses and all of our schools and memory care services in town. We have a ton of nursing homes and things like that with elderly and at-risk adults.”
Rafferty said the idea was to find a bloodhound, and Joie was found in South Carolina via a non-profit organization called Public Safety Dogs Inc.
Jachim spent a few days around the Labor Day holiday in South Carolina to get to know Joie and she had 280 hours of training, including some in her new home in Orland Park.
“She is a full-bred bloodhound and she’s going to turn one next month,” Rafferty said. “She had found lost adults and children and if we have a suspect with a scent for her to search, she will go and search.”
Rafferty added she will not be used to sniff out drugs.
And, about that sniffer?
“She has over 300 million scent receptors in her nose,” Rafferty said. “The average human has 5 million. So that will tell you how much better her nose is than our nose.”
He said Joie did a search last week in which she used the scent of spent shell casings from a fired gun to find a police officer a few blocks away.
“She is going to be one of the finest bloodhounds in the suburbs – I know that,” Rafferty said. “She’s amazing.”
