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Just doing their job, these bloodhounds have no idea they’re saving lives and catching killers

Two bloodhounds help Riverside County Sheriff with some of its toughest cases.

Windy and Copper, two dogs from Riverside County Sheriff’s bloodhound unit, train to track scents in Idyllwild. Zoe Meyers/The Desert Sun


On a foggy September morning in Idyllwild, Copper the bloodhound presses his nose into a black baseball cap and inhales deeply. He finds a perfect clue, naked to the human eye, and it beckons him down a hiking trail, across a dry creek bed, and up a small hill that leads into an empty field.

Copper, a new bloodhound to the unit, waits as Cpl. Todd Garvin attaches his leash before a track, September 20, 2017. Zoe Meyers/The Desert Sun

Copper howls. He’s got the scent.

“Go to work!” shouts Cpl. Todd Garvin. Copper darts ahead, pulling on his leash.

A minute later, the bloodhound has found him. A man dressed in black is hiding in the shrubbery at the field’s edge. Copper jumps on the man, slobbery with excitement, like a giant puppy who wants to play.

On any other day, this man could be a missing person or a wanted suspect, but today he’s just a volunteer. Copper and his partners have gathered in Idyllwild to practice tracking scents through the mountain wilderness. Just two months ago, the bloodhounds found a lost dementia patient wandering in this same forest.

“It’s an awesome moment when you find someone,” said Deputy Robert Ochoa, whose bloodhound partner, Windy, found the missing man. “It’s why we do this job, the family gets a happy ending and the dog gets a hamburger.”

The Riverside County Bloodhound Unit is made up of, from left, Cpl. Todd Garvin, Copper, Windy, and Deputy Robert Ochoa. Retired bloodhound Inga, who now lives with Cpl. Garvin, is pictured at the far left.
Zoe Meyers/The Desert Sun

Copper and Windy are the third generation of the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department’s Bloodhound Unit, a two-man, two-dog team based in Cabazon. The unit is just a tiny fragment of one of the nation’s largest police agencies, but in the two decades, since it was first envisioned, the team had amassed an impressive record of saving lives and catching suspects.

Coby Webb is photographed with her bloodhound, Maggie Mae around the time that Maggie was deputized in 2001. Courtesy of Coby Webb

Today, the unit is widely considered one of the best in the country, said Roger Titus, vice president of the National Police Bloodhound Association.

“You don’t stay around in police work if you don’t produce,” Titus said. “With bloodhound work, that means you have to have well-trained dogs that find people when nobody else can.”

“In Riverside, she sure has solved a lot of cases.”

The “she” in that sentence is Lt. Coby Webb, of the Palm Desert sheriff’s station, a dog-loving cop who was almost singlehandedly responsible for the founding of the bloodhound unit in 2001. If you want to learn about bloodhounds in Riverside County, just about every conversation starts and ends with Webb.

original article: https://www.desertsun.com/story/news/crime_courts/2017/09/25/how-dog-loving-cop-started-one-best-bloodhound-teams-country/691435001/

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