Dogs Helping the Police

'm sure by the title of this post, you thought I was going to write about K9 units. While such trained dogs are, without a doubt, valued members of any police force, the type of canine assistance I'm referring to was much more informal.

Though trained dogs are useful to police, officers are also commonly helped by average, garden-variety, neighborhood mutts as well. The way such dogs were useful was in the apprehension of fleeing suspects on foot.

As everyone knows, dogs are territorial. They know who belongs in their neighborhood and who doesn't. Any time a suspect is running from the police, especially in residential areas at night, dogs will kick up a ruckus until there is a neighborhood bark-a-thon.

Pursuing officers, if they listen carefully to the sequence and patterns of the barking, can many times find the direction the suspect took by following the trail of barking, just as surely as if the dogs were holding up signs pointing the direction and saying, "He went that-a-way"!

I saw this happen many times during my years on the force, and I quickly learned to pay attention to barking dogs in such instances.