[Tim Martens]

well the title was a little misleading, but now that i have your attention...

for those of you that work or train find and bark dogs, how do you handle felony car stop scenarios? you send the dog and he alerts on somebody in the car by barking, or do you send them in with the bite command?

 

[David Frost]

Awww Tim, It was misleading. I never miss an opportunity to express my disdain for B/H. But to your question. The dog is sent in to bite, if he can't make physical contact with the subject, same as in a building search, then it's an audible response. Did I get it right???

DFrost

 

[Tim Martens]

lol. it wasn't meant to be a right/wrong question. since you work/train find and bite, you didn't really answer my question. i was asking for those who work bark/hold dogs how they do felony car stops. i know find/bite dogs will go in and bite. my question is for bark and hold people...

 

[Lou Castle]

for those of you that work or train find and bark dogs, how do you handle felony car stop scenarios? you send the dog and he alerts on somebody in the car by barking, or do you send them in with the bite command?

Depends on the training. My dogs could be deployed with a command that had them either barking or biting. Usually for a car extraction, someone refusing to get out of the car, it was a bite. Are you talking about checking the car to see if anyone is in it before going up and clearing it by hand? If so then it was usually a bark.

 

[Tim Martens]

for those of you that work or train find and bark dogs, how do you handle felony car stop scenarios? you send the dog and he alerts on somebody in the car by barking, or do you send them in with the bite command?

Depends on the training. My dogs could be deployed with a command that had them either barking or biting. Usually for a car extraction, someone refusing to get out of the car, it was a bite. Are you talking about checking the car to see if anyone is in it before going up and clearing it by hand? If so then it was usually a bark.

yes. that is exactly the scenario i was talking about. for instance a stolen car. you do the high risk stop, pull the driver out, give the bluff announcement and then use the dog to clear the car prior to officers checking it. the way i look at it, it seems pointless to do a bark and hold in this situation. so your dog goes up and barks and you again order the guy out and he still doesn't come out, you're going to have the dog bite him anyway correct? and what if for some reason, the dog doesn't bark. what then? you're still going to have officers clear the car as if someone were still in there, but then they're going up there with the false sense of security that the dog cleared the car.

i know that it all boils down to training and that a dog trained in the B/H should bark at the guy, but we all know things can go awry for any number of different reasons.

as far as training the dog to go in and bite, it shouldn't make the B/H dirty in other areas if you only train this for the car extraction. where i could see problems would be a search where the suspect is hiding in a car. the only way around that is to do many reps so the dog is strong in the association with the car extraction command (which should be different from the bite and search commands).

my agency is B/H and i was thinking about this the other day. we train, as you do lou, to do a B/H on the felony/high risk stop and it doesn't make a lot of sense to me for the reasons i stated...

 

[Lou Castle]

the way i look at it, it seems pointless to do a bark and hold in this situation. so your dog goes up and barks and you again order the guy out and he still doesn't come out, you're going to have the dog bite him anyway correct?

Perhaps and perhaps not. The concern is that the person who won't (or can't) come out of the car is someone that we wouldn't bite. Most of it depends on what crime we're stopping the car for. If it's just GTA (Grand Theft, Auto) we probably wouldn't bite that person. In LA county it's almost never filed as a felony. We have to show that the crooks intended to "permanently deprive" the owner of his property or it's filed as "joyriding" a misdemeanor. About the only way to do that is if they were in the process of stripping the car or if they'd done such things as repaint it, put new plates on it or exchanged parts.

If it was for a violent felony or there were weapons involved then a bite might be appropriate but then the fear is that the crook was a young juvenile and it's never good PR to bite them. Then there's the scenario of an infant or very young juvenile in the car, which some dogs may bite. While the odds are long against it, they still exist. We've all heard of car thefts that occur while mom is paying for the gas and has left the baby in the car with the engine running. Often those crooks don't even know that there's a baby present until much later. Another scenario is that there's a kidnap victim who's tied up and can't come out. Again, the odds are long but biting them would be a tragedy.

I'm not a big fan of using the dog to "clear" the car. Keeping in mind that dog's don't find people, they find the strongest source of scent that they can get to, we have the fact that someone exited the car just a few minutes ago. It wouldn't be a fault if the dog barked at that scent. Unless you wait much longer than I've ever seen anyone wait before deploying the dog, perhaps as long as an hour, you're still going to have "fresh scent" in the car. He may bark and then you'll find that the car is actually empty.

As you say, either way you're going to use a team of officers to go up to the car and then to visually clear it. I'd suggest that this is a good place for the use of ballistic shields.