The days are numbered for peddlers of child pornography – there’s a new snout of justice on their trail, ready to sniff them out. Meet URL, a police dog that is specially trained to sniff out kiddie porn.
URL had his public debut when Utah’s Weber County Police Force shared a photo on their Facebook page, introducing their new officer to the community. URL is the only police dog specializing in porn-hunting in Utah, and one of only nine in the United States.
While the idea might sound a little silly, URL is quite serious about his job and has undergone rigorous training, which has equipped him with the ability to smell “electronic storage devices such as thumb drives, cellphones, SIM cards, SD cards, external hard drives, tablets and iPads”. The goal is to help detectives zone in on criminal evidence tied to potential suspects. URL can’t tell if a hard drive has illegal materials on it, but he can find it and allow his human detective partners to take it from there.
URL might only be a one-year-old puppy, but the former shelter dog has gone through a lot of education to earn his badge. He was trained by the same expert who trained Bear, a K-9 who helped in the arrest of Subway pitchman Jared Fogle. Bear found a thumb drive humans had initially missed when they searched Fogle’s home. Steven DeBrota, a prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s office in Indianapolis, admitted he was skeptical when he first learned about the specialty police dogs. “I thought I was being punked, but it does work,” said DeBrota, who called Bear “a key part of the team.”
While URL was undergoing his six-months training, police officer Cam Hartman also went through a specific coaching, to ensure he and his dog were an effective team. Both URL and Hartman will have to be re-certified on a yearly basis.
Todd Jordan spent months with Bear, using treats to help train him the same way other police dogs are trained to find bombs or drugs. Every time Bear would correctly sniff out an electronic piece of evidence hidden somewhere, he would be rewarded with food. “Labs are the best on this,” said Jordan. “They’ll do anything to please their owner.”
Secret weapons against crime like Bear and URL don’t come cheap. The Seattle Police department paid $9,500 for Bear last August. The Weber County Police Department didn’t reveal how much it paid for URL, only mentioning his addition to the force was made possible through funding from the Weber Metro Narcotics Strike Force.
Because dogs have such a strong sense of smell that can be trained to hone in on the right target, Steven DeBrota believes other departments will start to employ more pooches in the fight against cyber crime. Since the dogs sniff out not the content but the chemicals from the device, DeBrota believes they could possibly help law enforcement in the fight against terrorism as well.
