By CODE 4 K9 | SWAT/K9 Integration & Advanced Police K9 Training

This video shows a handler deploying his dog during a high-risk stop where shots were fired. The Santa Fe Police Department was in pursuit of a vehicle with two occupants. The driver had 10 outstanding warrants for his arrest, which appears to have prompted the pursuit.

During this video, you can see that officers were spread out from one another. Unlike team movement on SWAT, when you lose spatial awareness of where other people are in relation to you, bad stuff happens. The handler can see one of the suspects outside the vehicle and decides to deploy his dog even though there were other officers forward of his deployment location. This is a risky move unless you have trained your dog to recognize uniformed personnel in high-stress scenarios. Also, as a handler, you must ensure your dog has target identification before deploying him. I believe that both of these issues contributed to the dog’s behavior during this deployment.

Unless properly trained, most dogs will go to where most of the stimulus is coming from. When the dog was deployed, he didn’t seem to see the suspect standing outside the driver’s side of the suspect vehicle. Instead, he ran to the passenger side, which had its door closed. This is the point when another officer who was approaching the suspect vehicle from the passenger side shot his weapon. The dog veered off the suspect vehicle and bit the officer in the arm. Again, the dog did what most dogs do: go to where the stimulus is because that’s where the fight is.

There’s a mention of the dog biting another officer, except it was during training. The dog disengaged from the decoy and bit him in the face. What makes it worse is that the decoy was denied head protection. I think that the handler genuinely expected his dog to apprehend the driver, but he should have been cautious of other officers on scene. When working your dog, you must anticipate your dog’s behavior, both good and bad. Stay safe.