AFTER NEARLY two days in Kansas City, I shooed Casey and Rezzy into the RV and got back on the road. It was a windy May morning in Missouri, and it was nearly impossible to keep the RV in my lane as I drove east on Interstate 70 toward St. Louis. I was blasting the Crash Test Dummies song “Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm” when I heard the siren behind me.
The officer took his time getting out of the cruiser, and when he finally asked me if I knew why he’d stopped me, I told him that keeping the RV steady in these conditions was about as unlikely as the hapless Kansas City Royals winning a World Series. It was a miracle I hadn’t been pulled over earlier in my journey.
He broke into a half-smile and asked where I was heading. I pointed to Casey and Rezzy—wedged uncomfortably in their usual spot between the seats—and told him about my journey and my book.
“Oh, like Travels with Charley?” he said. “Why don’t you come back to my car and meet my dog?”
“You’re a K9 cop?” I asked. I couldn’t believe it. The next day, I was planning to ride along with a K9 officer in Belleville, Illinois, just over the state line from St. Louis.
I carefully exited the Chalet’s side entrance (the furthest door from the big rigs barreling past us) and made my way to the officer’s cruiser. There, I stood awkwardly outside his passenger-side door, waiting for confirmation that I should get inside.
“I’m not arresting you—get in!” he said with a laugh.
The officer’s dog, a large German Shepherd, lounged behind a grate in the rear of the car. “He’s a great dog,” the officer said, “but sometimes he can be a pain in the ass, just like any other dog.”
The officer seemed happy to have someone to talk to. He lamented that many cities and towns across the country had slashed their budgets in recent years, meaning that fewer dogs were on duty.
“These dogs can do things we just can’t,” he told me. “They’re faster than we are, they can get in places we can’t, and they have better noses.” (Rapper Snoop Dogg learned that the hard way in 2012 while on tour in Norway, when an airport police dog marked Snoop as carrying marijuana as soon as he walked into the terminal.)
Dogs have been used to patrol the streets and control people since the Legions of ancient Rome. They were especially popular on the night watch in Belgium, where the first training school for police dogs was established in 1899. Neighboring Germany followed suit in the early twentieth century, developing new breeds trained for increasingly specialized police work, though some in law enforcement questioned whether the animals added much value.
Dogs were almost removed from New York’s police force in 1920, when the police commissioner at the time claimed the dogs didn’t actually make the city safer. The city’s police dogs back then would roam neighborhoods with detached houses, barking when they spotted possible evidence of a burglary (an open ground-floor window, for example) or a sign of danger (smoke coming from a window). In retrospect, that probably wasn’t the smartest use of a dog’s skill set.
In 1971, the NYPD procured a bomb-sniffing dog, Brady, who, The New York Times wrote, was “viewed skeptically until she detected explosives on a plane at Kennedy Airport.” Today, police dogs carry out a wide variety of critical tasks. They chase after suspects, search for lost people, and sniff out everything from narcotics and explosives to human remains. Specially trained dogs also accompany the U.S. military on its most challenging missions. In 2011, a Belgian Malinois named Cairo was part of the Navy SEAL team that killed Osama bin Laden. During the Iraq War, so many U.S.-trained combat dogs were injured that the army opened a surgical care unit for dogs.
It felt strange to sit in a squad car on the side of a highway talking about dogs. Though I’d done nothing wrong, I never got comfortable in the cruiser and never thought to ask for the officer’s name. Eventually, he said I could go. I was halfway back to the motorhome when I realized I’d forgotten to tell him something. I hurried back to his cruiser and leaned in the passenger-side window.
“If you want,” I said, “you can follow my trip on Facebook.”
THE CITIZENS of Belleville, Illinois, were (unfortunately) well behaved the next day during my drive-along with officer Brian Dowdy and his two dogs—a nine-year-old German Shepherd, Steve, and a four-year-old Belgian Malinois, Art.
It was midday on a Saturday, and the police dispatcher wasn’t giving us much to work with: a barking dog, a stolen cell phone, a fender-bender.
“Does no one commit crimes in this town?” I asked, eager for some action.
“It’s a Saturday morning,” he said. “The bad guys are still sleeping.”
As we drove around this city of 44,000, Brian, who was friendly and handsome and looked younger than his thirty-seven years, told me that he’d always wanted to be a K9 officer.
“I had sixteen dogs growing up,” he said, “and I only wanted to be a cop if I could have a dog with me.”
Brian began his crime-fighting career as a bike cop for a hospital, where he lobbied unsuccessfully for a canine sidekick.
He now runs his own police dog training school and never goes on patrol in his SUV without a dog. Brian’s police vest is equipped with a button that opens a hydraulic door on the back of his cruiser, in case he’s in a tight spot and needs his dog to come to the rescue.
“When that door opens,” Brian explained, “my dogs know they’re supposed to bite something.”
I asked him what he looked for in a police dog. “Personally, I like a dog with a tremendous amount of confidence,” he said, sipping on a Mountain Dew and gnawing on some Kodiak chewing tobacco. Brian couldn’t get over the fact that I didn’t like Mountain Dew, which he considers the world’s greatest beverage. “I like dominant dogs, Alpha dogs, dogs that will want to challenge me occasionally. Because when they get out in the field, I’ve learned those dogs have no trouble challenging a bad guy. Not every officer wants that, but for me it works.”
Typically, Brian has only one dog at a time in his cruiser. But we were on our way to a town fair where Brian had been asked to give a public demonstration about police dogs, and he wanted to use both animals. Art was fairly new to the job.
“I’ve only had him for a year,” Brian said, “and he’s come a long way in that time. For the first few days he was in my car, I couldn’t get him out.”
“Why is that?” I asked.
“Because he’d try to bite me in the face,” Brian said with a chuckle.
At that moment, Art started barking at a car that had pulled up next to us at a light.
“What’s he riled up about?” I wondered.
“The guy in that car’s looking at him,” Brian explained. “If they don’t look at him, he’s fine.”
Art’s bite command is “Attack,” and Brian didn’t need to tell the dog twice during the demonstration at the town fair. When Brian said the magic word, Art catapulted himself at an officer wearing a protective jacket, biting down on the man’s arm and refusing to let go. Brian told the crowd that Art was born in France and preferred receiving his commands in French.
“Aux pieds!” Brian said a few minutes later, prompting the dog to heel.
When someone in the crowd asked if Art lived with Brian, he confessed to letting the dog sleep in bed with him. “He’s spoiled,” Brian said. “I try not to give him people-food, but when he’s looking at you with those eyes, it’s hard not to.” (Brian was further proof that even many of those who live with working dogs—and who know, intellectually, that they shouldn’t spoil their animal—are as powerless as the rest of us when faced with a dog’s pleading gaze.)
Next, it was Steve’s turn to try to remove a chunk of the fellow officer’s arm. Brian told the crowd that Steve almost never had the chance to apprehend fleeing suspects.
“He was supposedly vicious and untrainable, and the people who had him were going to put him down,” he said. “So I took him, because I saw his potential.” Steve ended up being the best dog Brian has ever worked with. “He’s vicious when it comes to
bad guys,” he told some young teens seated in the first row of spectators. “But if you’re a good guy, then he’s a lover, not a fighter.”
Brian further impressed the teens by demonstrating that to get Steve to bark, all he had to say were two words: “free beer!” Steve barked ferociously as Brian screamed, “Free beer! Free beer! Free beer!”
A police dog’s bark is usually enough to end a fight. Earlier that day, Brian had recounted the time he responded to a bar brawl involving dozens of people. When Brian and Steve arrived, there were ten cops on the scene struggling to disperse the crowd.
“I said ‘free beer,’ Steve started barking, and everyone started behaving themselves real quickly,” he recalled. “Sometimes, having a dog is like having a gun.”
But not all criminals throw up their hands at the sight of a police dog. Later in the day, as we resumed our patrol, Brian told me about the many household appliances—pots, pans, televisions—that fleeing suspects have hurled at his dogs.
“One guy even threw a cat,” Brian told me as we circled a rundown hotel where he was on the lookout for drug activity. “You can imagine how that turned out.”
“What happened?” I asked, fearing the worst for the poor animal.
“What do you think happened? The dog killed the cat. He caught it in the air, shook it once, and it was dead.”
Brian spent a good portion of our time together apologizing for the lack of crime in Belleville that day, and I wondered if he might start inventing reasons to pull people over. Our first target was a woman driving a silver Pontiac Grand Am with a busted taillight and a bumper sticker that read, “Ask Me If I Give A Fuck.”
During our second stop, of a dark Honda driven by a man with prior drug convictions, I finally got to see Art in action. He circled the car and alerted Brian to the presence of drugs inside by sitting down near the passenger-side door. (Brian trains his dogs to sit if they smell drugs.) But a further search of the vehicle by Brian revealed only cannabis residue.
“If there’s anyone else you want me to pull over, just say the word,” Brian joked as his shift was coming to an end.
I asked Brian if there was anything else I should know about police dogs. He took a swig of Mountain Dew and looked in the rearview window at his animals.
“These dogs are really important for our image—the way the public perceives us,” he said. “People are much more likely to talk to me when I’m in uniform if I have my dog with me. Having a dog humanizes me. Dogs stimulate conversations with the public. People stop and ask about them, kids want to meet them. The dogs make us more approachable. Suddenly we’re not the big bad police—we’re just another guy who loves dogs.”
And Brian loves dogs so much, he said, that he’d likely quit the force if he couldn’t ride with one.
“I don’t really want to have any job where I’m not allowed to bring my dog to work,” he said. “Know what I mean?”
“I do,” I replied, thinking of my dogs napping at my feet every day as I write.
TWO MILES from St. Louis’s soaring Gateway Arch, across the Mississippi River, there’s a forgotten city named East St. Louis.
A notorious example of inner-city blight, it’s an “urban prairie” of abandoned and burned homes, boarded-up former businesses, decaying streets strewn with garbage, and entire blocks overrun with vegetation. I’ve visited many ghettos in my work as a journalist; East St. Louis is the bleakest.
It is also the deadliest. This city of 27,000 has the highest per capita murder rate in the country (seventeen times the national average), and every few blocks a stop sign or other makeshift shrine is decorated with clothes or teddy bears, signifying where someone has been murdered.
Amidst the wasteland, dogs eke out a hardscrabble existence. They roam the city’s potholed streets, sleep on discarded mattresses in derelict buildings, and hide out in overgrown fields. These “wild dogs,” as writer Melinda Roth calls them, are “genetic castaways on the third rail between domesticity and wildness.”
The dogs of East St. Louis have it worse than rez dogs. On Indian reservations, drunk teenagers sometimes try to run over dogs with their cars. In East St. Louis, sober teenagers shoot dogs for sport. Many dogs are trained for fighting, or used as bait to test the bloodthirstiness and fighting instincts of promising Pit Bulls. Even the dogs of what are considered responsible owners in East St. Louis tend to spend their lives chained to a garage or fence post, circling the same ten square feet of dirt or broken pavement.
I’d come here to spend two days with my friend Randy Grim, the fifty-year-old founder of Stray Rescue of St. Louis. I’d first learned of Randy when I picked up his book Don’t Dump the Dog, which is part dog training manual and part diary of a neurotic, self-deprecating dog rescuer. Randy is foul-mouthed, germaphobic, and socially anxious. The only living beings that don’t scare him are dogs.
“I’ve hosted parties I did not attend,” he confesses in Don’t Dump the Dog. “I flush my own toilet with my foot. During the course of my lifetime, I have visited the emergency room with symptoms of the plague, botulism, bird flu, tuberculosis, West Nile, malaria, and anthrax poisoning.”
Randy’s also terrified of bridges, which I discovered when I spent a week rescuing dogs with him in 2009. On a cold, overcast December morning, he’d driven us around in his white Jeep, which was strewn with dog bowls, dog food, leashes, cigarette cartons, and bottles of hand sanitizer. As we rolled over the Martin Luther King Bridge, he blasted the Ramones’ “I Wanna Be Sedated.” Then he grabbed my wrist with his free hand, looked at me with abject terror, and screamed, “Oh my God, we’re going to DIE IN THIS CAGE!”
He was fine once we were safely on the other side. “As you can see, I have issues,” he said, lighting his third cigarette in fifteen minutes.
It probably takes a man with issues to drive—unarmed—around the most dangerous city in America, rescuing dogs and trying to convince gang-bangers to treat animals with something approximating respect. Randy has been carjacked, chased from backyards and abandoned homes, and threatened with a gun.
“That’s the guy who almost shot me,” Randy told me soon after the bridge incident, pointing to a man milling around outside a small brick house. Randy smiled and slowed the car to a stop, as if he wanted to say hello.
“Are we really stopping here?” I asked. It was my turn to look terrified.
“Oh, he won’t shoot us,” Randy assured me. “He and I are buds now. He just didn’t understand at first that all I wanted to do was feed his dog.”
“What’s up, homie?” the man said as we got out of the Jeep. He was beaming at the sight of Randy, who wore a baggy sweatshirt and jeans over his tall, soft-featured frame. “You must have known my dog was hungry!”
“I was just telling my friend here how we met,” Randy said.
“Oh, yeah, that was a trip.”
“You thought I was a crazy white guy!”
“Yes, yes I did. I was like, ‘What’s this crazy white dude doing snooping around?” He turned to face me. “At first I thought Randy was a cop. Then I thought he was on dope.”
“If I remember correctly, your exact words were, ‘I’m going to pop you,” Randy reminded him. “So I said, ‘Well, if you’re going to kill me, can I at least feed your dog first?’ You didn’t know what to say to that.”
“I’m a changed man now, though,” the man insisted. “I’ve found God.”
“And thank God for that,” Randy said.
Later that day, as we drove past a yard with a Rottweiler chained to a crooked, ramshackle doghouse (a sign on it read Beware—Crazy), I asked Randy why he never carries a weapon.
“Because I’d be on Death Row,” he said simply. “I know myself. I’d get so angry at the way people treat their dogs out here, or at the people from the suburbs who come to dump their dogs here when they don’t want them anymore, I’d go on a rampage. And I’d never forgive myself if a dog got killed in the crossfire.”
I’ll never for
get that first week with Randy. Together, we found and rescued eight puppies from an abandoned building and a sweet, emaciated Pit Bull from behind a graffitied house; we convinced a crack addict to help us corral two more young strays, one of which Randy named Benoit; we lured a very pregnant stray into a humane trap and rushed her to a vet; and we poured bags of dog food for several feral packs that wouldn’t get within thirty yards of us. (Feral dogs are usually born on the streets and don’t have much contact with humans.)
Driving around East St. Louis with Randy was also heartbreaking. First, there was the human suffering; I’d never seen poverty like this in America. Time profiled East St. Louis in 1969 and proclaimed that “only the brave dare walk its streets after dark.” It’s only gotten worse since then. I thought about what it must be like to grow up here, smack-dab in the middle of hell on earth.
“When I was in New Orleans rescuing dogs after Hurricane Katrina, most of the rescuers who’d come from around the country to help couldn’t get over how depressing the Ninth Ward was,” Randy told me. “But it’s Katrina every day here. And no one cares. If society doesn’t care about the people here, it sure as hell isn’t going to do anything about the dogs. As bad as the people have it, the dogs have it worse.”
“I suppose people who are beaten down need something to beat down, too,” I said.
“Exactly. But I still hate people for it. The dogs walk around here with limps, cuts, gunshot wounds. And no one gives a shit.”
Just about every house or backyard we passed had a dog’s death associated with it. “I’ve found dead dogs in that house, and some in that one, and some over there in that one with the overturned couch in the driveway,” Randy said as we rolled down yet another street littered with garbage and rusted-out furniture. “In the winter, so many puppies freeze to death in these houses.”
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