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 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.”
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.
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/
