I train dogs in electronic storage detection, primarily focusing on child exploitation and human trafficking cases. The dogs work to find electronic storage devices like SD cards, thumb drives, micro-SDs, and cell phones.
Our dogs have saved thousands of kids, honestly. Micro-SD cards typically hold 200,000-300,000 images. If you think about every image being a victim, then if a dog finds even one of those micro-SDs, then it’s all worth it. Our main focus is always the child.
My current class takes me to 195 dogs in the past 10 years, with dogs now in 7 countries and all across the United States. I work mostly with Labrador Retrievers and a few Golden Retrievers. Labs are a great fit because they’ll do anything for praise or food. Plus, no one’s really scared of a Lab. When we’re at a search warrant, we’re always there for the kids, so we don’t want the dogs to be intimidating to them. We want them to turn into a comfort dog until it’s time to go to work.
Most people that are using these electronic storage devices store all of their media, photographs, and videos of child exploitation there. They’re not necessarily hiding them just from police officers, they’re also hiding them from their families, their wives, anyone like that. So when we train our dogs, we set up different hides around the room in places we’ve found devices before in other search warrants– up high, in light fixtures, buried in the ground, places like that.
When the dogs first go in, we tell them “let’s get to work” so they know it’s time to go, and then we say “seek” until they sit. And when they sit, we know that there’s something within around a three-foot radius. Instead of having to look through that entire area, we’ll say “show me” and the dog will point to the area where the storage device is hidden. They narrow the area down to around a foot or maybe even smaller.
I’m a retired firefighter, and I originally got started training dogs for ignitable liquid detection. It was always great to have a dog with me when I did fire investigations. I didn’t really know anything about the world of child exploitation and human trafficking, but one day I heard someone talking about how they were frustrated at a search warrant because they couldn’t find a micro-SD. I’d heard about a chemist at the Connecticut state police who actually identified the chemical that was inside of electronic storage devices, so I told the investigator here in Indiana about it. I knew I could probably train a dog to do that, and that’s what really got me interested.
Once you start going to search warrants and start seeing the victims, it’s hard to turn a blind eye to that. This has become more of a mission to me than anything. In one sense it’s cool, but rescuing kids on a daily basis? That’s priceless.
Learn more about Jordan Detection K-9 and their mission here.
