Because drugs and cash go together like bees and honey, drug detector dogs have become very good at finding cash, much of which is tainted with drug residue. On one job, Willo found 1.5 million dollars. After Bindi had retired, Willo got a new drug detector dog, a little golden lab called Danni. The incredible find happened in a shipping container at a storage facility that had been under surveillance by police. When enough of the comings and goings of some shifty chaps had been recorded, police gained a warrant to search the small shipping container.
When Willo went in through the door, the inside space looked innocent enough – until Danni went bananas. The place was filled with tea chests. The golden lab immediately stood on her hind legs and put her front paws on one of the many tea chests in the container. In her excitement she tried to jump up on it, wanting to sniff higher up. Willo tried to fashion a walkway for his dog to climb up. Once he connected a few planks, he hoisted Danni up. She made her way carefully along a series of tea chests, but after a couple of metres, she slipped and jumped down, landing on her front paws, butt in the air, stuck between tea chests.
It was a comedy of errors. Willo tried to lean in to pull Danni up, but she was excited and pawed at the ground, trying to scramble her way out of the confined space. As Willo pushed his way closer to the dog, he could see that she was scrambling against what looked like a bunch of black plastic Myer bags. Danni’s scrambling paws had disturbed the bags and opened some of them. They were filled with cash – fifties and hundreds, in a sea of bags.
While drug detector dogs are not taught to find money, they smell the drug residue on the cash and find it anyway. Willo uttered a very rude word at the sight of what he suspected was an awful lot of money. The detective inspector on the scene quickly took in the situation and decided to get the cash removed by a bank. It took three days to count it.
The funny thing about the case was that the shifty types who had been videoed going in and out of the container denied any knowledge of the cash. ‘Not ours,’ they said, eyes wide. ‘Never seen it before.’
Must have been the cash fairy.
Unclaimed cash goes into government-consolidated revenue, so they didn’t get any arguments from the police.
During one search, Danni indicated a tile in a bathroom. The searching police officers didn’t think it necessary to rip off tiles, until they found out that the guy who owned the house was a tiler. When they broke a couple of tiles off, they found 20 kilograms of cannabis resin under the bath hob. The perfect hiding place would have fooled police officers searching the house, but never a drug dog.
After a quarter of a century and four drug detector dogs, Willo has seen it all. Times have changed. In the early days of Willo’s work with drug dogs, the end result was about incarceration – you caught someone with drugs and it was your job to get them off the streets. Nowadays, it is more about steering young people in a safer direction before they become addicted. It is about health and harm minimisation.
When police do street screening and a PAD dog sits next to a young person outside a nightclub, they often can’t believe they’ve been caught. Hiding a tiny ecstasy tablet in a pocket or handbag, they feel that it’s undetectable. But the dog always knows.
‘You see the look of sheer fear in a young person’s eyes – they haven’t had any exposure to police – you have no doubt that it makes a difference in their behaviour,’ says Willo. He believes these early wake-up calls are incredibly effective.
But the police don’t always get to people in time. In a recent operation that targeted the King Street nightclub precinct in Melbourne, Willo took his dog into a couple of underground car parks near the nightclubs. He and fellow police officers found three young women unconscious in a car park. They had taken quantities of GHB.
He had seen this type of thing before; often in these circumstances, groups arrange for a designated person to abstain from taking the drug, and to be on hand with crystal meth to administer if anyone stopped breathing from a GHB overdose.
On this night, the three women were unconscious in the car. Outside the car were the telltale little bottles. They didn’t have their designated first-aider armed with meth. In the car was a baby seat; one of them was a young mother. Willo and his colleagues called the ambulance, and then called the young women’s parents.
Willo sees ice as the biggest scourge on society. It has the potential to do the most harm most quickly. The drug seems to strip users of their self-esteem, and the pursuit of the drug becomes all consuming. Ice becomes their prison warden. But not for long.
Prolonged use is deadly. It eats away the brain. Users scratch at their skin, which crawls with untold horrors. Meth mouth decays the gums and makes their teeth fall out. You can’t turn back the clock with ice. Police dog handlers see this a lot.
In one house in Moonee Ponds, the parents were ice addicts and the kids were largely left to their own devices. Willo opened the only fridge in the house and cockroaches spilled out. He was used to such things, so it only momentarily stopped him in his tracks. He didn’t know what the kids ate – certainly nothing from the fridge. Police conducting these searches often call in the Department of Human Services to come and look after the kids. The houses all smell the same – filthy. Washing fills baths and showers; beds are never changed.
Narcotic dog handlers often become the compass for what is going on in the community. They know what’s going on because they see it first-hand. Some addicts go to rehab, but if there are success stories, Willo has never seen one.
In regional areas, it is becoming more common. Outlaw motorcycle gangs move into town and sell ice to vulnerable locals. They target the young with a try-before-you-buy scheme and get them addicted, and then make them foot soldiers by paying them in product. The users become the property of the gangs – puppets dancing to the bikies’ tunes.
The family see the addict’s downward slide, but the addict doesn’t. They often isolate themselves because they don’t want the family to intervene. Some go from trying ice to dying within a year. Early signs include mood swings, loss of appetite, binge eating and erratic behaviour. An addict’s appearance will alter over time to become gaunt; the colouring of their skin will look a little jaundiced or unhealthy. Parents should never think that their kids wouldn’t try it.
The drug dogs come into their own when they detect early users, and something can be done before the rot sets in.
One warm summer’s day, Willo and Danni joined a team of police searching a huge sheep station. When Willo and his dog finished, it was time for a bit of paperwork. Rather than leave Danni in the hot car, Willo left her to lie in the shade of an old oak tree while he made notes on his running sheet. When the other police officers had finished their search, they pulled their police car over to where Willo was parked and told him they were done. Willo nodded to them and got in his own car and took off slowly down the farm’s kilometre-long driveway. When he got to the end of the road, ready to turn out of the property, some cops driving behind him pulled up next to him.
‘Is there any chance you are going to go back and get your dog?’ said one of the cops through the open window.
Willo couldn’t believe it. Danni was normally in the back of the car, and he was used to driving off without giving it much thought. As he drove back up to the oak tree, he wondered what had gone through Danni’s mind as she watched the trail of dust from the police car as her handler disappeared up the driveway. Danni was still resting, unfazed; she hadn’t moved from her spot under the tree. Thinking about it later, Willo saw that moment as an illustration of the kind of trust that a police dog has in its handler. Danni didn’t move because she had complete faith he would come back for her.
And of course, he did.
WILLO’S TRAINING TIPS
Dog training is a little like raising children. You might have to tell your dog to sit ten times before it does, but you don’t give up.
Dogs are great readers of body language; they will know what kind
of mood you’re in and react accordingly.
It is important to let a dog be a dog; let it have a wander and a sniff and then, later, it can be back to business when it’s time to work.
A dog is an animal and it needs down time.
CHAPTER 14
Biting the hand that pats you
Senior Constable Mick Collins loves catching crooks and has an excellent arrest rate. He also has an affinity with dogs. Stir in the desire for fitness, and the ability to work independently, and you have the recipe for a good police dog handler.
Mick grew up in a regular law-abiding family in the suburbs. As a youngster, the only time he’d dealt with the police was when someone stole his pushbike and he had to report the theft at the local police station. When he grew up and joined the Victoria Police, he was the first in his family to ever do so.
The week that Mick graduated from the Police Academy, his squad was filmed. Being interviewed for the camera, he was asked where he saw his career going. ‘Dog Squad,’ he said without hesitation. Back then, he didn’t know much about the squad, but he knew enough to know he wanted to be a part of it.
Mick began his general policing career at Altona North and then moved to St Kilda. It didn’t take him long to see things that opened his eyes to a different world from the one of his childhood. He reckons that police spend 80 per cent of their time dealing with 1 per cent of the population. He is always careful to remind himself of this, because at the end of a police officer’s day the world can seem like a grim place without that particular perspective.
Mick’s first experience as a young police officer that really stayed with him involved the suicide of a young man. It was over a decade ago, and it happened on a Thursday, just six days before Christmas. Mick was on regular patrol when he was called to a jumper on the West Gate Bridge. Video surveillance had spotted the young man sitting on the rails, but they were too late; just as Mick and his partner made it to the start of the sprawling bridge, the man jumped. He left his phone and wallet on the guardrail.
According to the identification inside the wallet, the young man had been just nineteen years old. Mick – just twenty-two himself – looked down into the swirling waters of the Maribyrnong River, and wondered why anyone would want to kill themselves. He flipped open the man’s phone. There were forty-odd messages and missed calls. It looked like he had people who cared about him.
Underneath the bridge, the wind speed had swept the man sideways, and he had not landed in the water, but instead had crashed to his death on the muddy bank. Mick and his partner made their way to the bottom of the bridge; they had to check the man’s face against the wallet ID. It was a match.
Aside from a couple of dead bodies Mick had seen at the morgue when he was in training, this was his first death on the job. The big difference was that the morgue bodies, laid out neatly on the stainless steel tables, were without stories. This dead man lying in the mud, every bone in his body crushed and shattered, had a story. Till his dying breath, he had people trying to ring him, people who cared. And he was young; until minutes before Mick saw him, he had his whole life ahead of him. But not now. And because of the proximity to Christmas, that festive occasion would now forever be tainted for those he left behind.
When Mick got more experienced in the matter of death, he came to understand that it is the people who don’t ask for help that are most at risk; they just do it. The Westgate jumper had made no calls to police. He just went up and jumped. Maybe it was the story of what came before, the similarity in age, or the fact that it was before Christmas, but Mick never forgot his entry into this new and darker world.
While it was his first body, it wouldn’t be his last. His experiences in these early days helped him to understand death; they also helped him become more sympathetic to the victims and families he met during the course of his work.
Mick had been in the job four and a half years when he first applied to the Dog Squad. While he didn’t get in, he did get some favourable feedback from one of the officers in charge. He was told that he was a good candidate, but he needed to gain more operational experience in policing. Mick returned to general duties for eighteen months to do just that.
But he didn’t stop there. Because of his ambition to join the squad, Mick knew that he couldn’t have his own dog – handlers must devote all of their time and energy to their police dog. He’d had dogs in his family when he was younger, including a Rhodesian ridgeback and a Hungarian vizsla. These big dogs learnt how to sit and stay, and they both walked well on the lead. But that was about it. Given his lack of dog-training knowledge, Mick volunteered to join the Dog Squad’s puppy-walking program. Puppy walkers are the volunteers who take potential police pups when they are a couple of months old and keep them for the first year before handing them back to the squad. Mick figured that volunteering to be a puppy walker would give him valuable experience in handling the dogs, and he would also meet handlers and trainers at the squad’s monthly Sunday training days. This decision put him in the company of those he wanted to join.
One of the dogs that Mick looked after as a puppy walker was a breeding Rottweiler called Phoenix. Phoenix had produced legendary police dog Nat, but when Mick looked after one of her puppies called Neon, the pup didn’t make the grade. Such were the vagaries of breeding.
As well as looking after police dogs as a puppy walker, Mick worked on his physical fitness. He trained every day to be as fit as he could for when the next Dog Squad vacancy came up. He also did a detective course as a backup plan. Just in case.
The second time Mick applied to the squad, he was more confident. He had more operational experience and he had a good arrest rate. When he got the call that he had been accepted, the bosses organised to do a home inspection. In the intervening days he had proposed to his girlfriend, who was now his fiancée. She was now part of the team, and was at Mick’s house to greet the bosses as well.
Flynn is a black German shepherd that came through the puppy-walking program. He is a fine-looking dog, and devoted to Mick. Like a lot of handlers, Mick began with a different dog that didn’t work out. Mick was at the Dog Squad kennels one day, and a trainer pointed out Flynn; he had been trained as a backup dog.
After his first dog was sacked, Mick was presented with Flynn. Being fairly new to the squad, Mick relied on the trainers to point out the qualities of the dog. It took a good three or four weeks to establish the dog–handler bond, perhaps because Flynn was a boundary pusher. Right from the start, Mick knew he would have his work cut out for him; there was an air of arrogance about the dog.
Away from the security of the training environment, most dog handlers find their first real job a little nerve-racking. Mick and Flynn were called to an assault near the Sunshine Railway Station. A couple of teenagers had assaulted some other teenagers near the station and then run off. Mick cast the dog across the road from the station, and Flynn immediately picked up a scent, leading Mick back towards the train station. The assailants must have doubled back.
Mick radioed through to the local uniformed officers, who were still at the station. The offenders were headed back their way. The locals caught the teenagers a couple of minutes later. I’ve got a good one here, Mick thought.
A dog’s first bite is always an interesting thing for his handler to see. In training, police dogs bite other handlers who wear the big padded bite arm. The dogs have lots of fun in these controlled attacks. However, in real life there isn’t someone standing stationary wearing a bite arm, and things are always a lot more unpredictable. Flynn’s first bite on the job showed that he didn’t really know how to do it.
Mick and Flynn were called to a tense stand-off at a suburban house. A middle-aged man, armed with an axe, had held police at bay for hours. Officers at the scene had used capsicum spray on him, to no effect. Things became more serious as Mick arrived, because the man had poured petrol through his house and in his backyard.
When Mick and Flynn made their way around to
the rear of the man’s property, they saw first-hand the state he was in. The axe-wielding man was ranting and raving, and he now held a lighter. Just one spark could set the whole place on fire.
Mick called on him to stop, but the man charged towards him. There was no alternative but to command Flynn to take the man down. Flynn had picked up on the tension, and the yelling had whipped him into a frenzy of excited barking. As Flynn ran towards the man, Mick could see his dog’s momentary confusion as he looked at the man’s arm. Where’s the bite arm? he seemed to be wondering.
Flynn barked and ran around the man. Finally he bit the man on the shoe. While the bite didn’t even penetrate the leather, it did send the man off balance, which meant that Mick could jump into the fray and wrestle him to the ground.
When other police officers came in to make the arrest, the excited first-time police dog snapped at them and bit the dangling radio cord on the utility belt of one of the cops. Mick learnt something important about his furry sidekick: Flynn took several minutes to calm down after an exciting arrest. And in those minutes, he would bite anyone – even his handler.
Through trial and error, Mick would eventually learn to remove Flynn from the action once it was over, and make him sit for a while at a distance to give him time to settle down. Unlike other handlers, who pat their dogs after such events or even roll around with them, Mick couldn’t have any physical contact with Flynn. He simply held his dog close on the lead, and together dog and handler kept their distance from everyone else. Mick also had to discourage other police officers from approaching the dog to give him a congratulatory pat. He would bite the hand that patted him. After a while, Flynn would be fine. ‘There’s no malice in it,’ says Mick. ‘You know he’s going to do it, so you modify your behaviour.’
Despite his aggression on the job, Flynn had the ability to switch off when not on duty. When he was sitting passively by Mick’s side, he could appear almost dozy. But once the game was on, it was a different story. Like all good police dogs, Flynn loved police work and loved being at the Dog Squad in Attwood. The only time he barked in the car was when it would hit the dip in the road near the gates to the squad. Flynn would let out an excited woof. He knew that once they drove in the gate, he would get to bark at a bunch of his canine colleagues. The squad was excitement by association. Flynn remembered the good times he had there while training, and never failed to bark his greeting at the dip in the road.
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