East End Police Give K9 Training Demonstration at GHS

Courtney Cocheo ‘21

May 2021

Three officers, one each from the Southold, Southampton and Riverhead police departments, gave a demonstration to GHS elementary school students on K9 police dogs and how they train them.

The three officers are trained as K9 officers, and have been working with these dogs in training through their departments. They brought along three K9s from each police department and demonstrated a variety of skills that the K9s have been taught to do.

Students had various questions, such as the dogs’ age, when they start training, and whether they get along with other dogs.

Police departments across Suffolk County use both German Shepherds and Belgium Malinois as K9s. These specific breeds of dogs, the officers noted, are selected because they are some of the smartest.

Overall, the departments only select male dogs that are between 1 and 1.5 years old for training.

The dogs chosen are exclusively male because their personalities are better suited for the job of a K9 dog. Female dogs, the officers said, have a motherly instinct that male dogs do not generally have. When there is a call, the officers need their canine companion to be trained to either find evidence or track something down. Females would be more protective of their owner or trainer, which would distract them from those tasks.

The dogs go through an intense six months of training, plus one month of obedience training.

Officer Williams said that being brand new to the program had at first made training the dogs hard. However, he was thankful to have had fellow officer Morris show him the ropes. He said that the slow but effective process is gradually getting used to the dogs and shaping their behaviors. “When a new dog comes to K9, they are just overwhelmed, and some dogs learn faster than others.” They explained that the learning process could be slow, though eventually all the training that the officers and K9s do together comes together.

A key part of the training process is teaching the dogs how to sense a human odor, since that allows K9s to sense someone’s location. The way that each dog processes commands is different depending on who’s giving the commands. Each K9 is trained to listen to their owner and their owner only. Each officer gets to take their dog home, which plays an important part in developing a bond between the K9 and its owner.

Elementary students were most impressed by the verbal commands that dogs could do. Like humans, dogs are much more eager and likely to learn when they’re young. The officers said the learning process can be slow, but that the main goal is to make these dogs as well trained as possible in order to help our communities when needed.