Byline: Ryan Myers
Oct. 9--Dingo has a dope problem. Almost everywhere he goes, this cop ends up with his nose in drugs. Lucky for Dingo, the Beaumont Police Department has made an exception for his drug obsession. Then there's that other problem. At 2 years old, he's also a little under the age requirement for being on the force. But Dingo is the latest recruit to a contingent of Belgian Malinois dogs the department employs for narcotics detection, fugitive tracking and a variety of other police pursuits. Born in Holland and trained in Louisiana, Dingo hit the streets of Beaumont last week with aplomb, sniffing out 175 pounds of marijuana during his first traffic stop. 'It was a cool way for him to start,' said Dingo's handler, Officer Jerry LaChance.
The Beaumont Police Department has been using dogs for more than 25 years, according to former Beaumont police officer Walter Billingsley, now a deputy chief with the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office. 'The Beaumont Police Department's first dog was a golden retriever named Tika we bought from U.S. Customs,' Billingsley said in an interview at his office in downtown Beaumont. A regular four-legged force has followed in her paw prints to aid Beaumont officers. The Beaumont Police Department K-9 unit formed in 1992 with five German Shepherds born and raised on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, explained Al Johnson, a sergeant with the Beaumont Police Department and supervisor of the K-9 Unit. Today, the department's four canines are Belgian Malinois, a dog breed that looks like a smaller, sleeker, shorthaired German Shepherd. The Malinois, Johnson said, isn't prone to some health problems that plague the German Shepherd. While this breed is available in the United States, the department has acquired most dogs from overseas, thanks in part to a breeding tradition there favored by the companies that train the canines, LaChance said. 'It's quicker for the guys who sell the dogs to buy the dogs already conditioned. That way all they have to do is bring them over and finish training them,' LaChance said. All dogs on the Beaumont police force are what Johnson calls 'dual-purpose,' meaning they are trained for narcotics detection and for patrol. Patrol dogs are trained to protect their handlers and search for fugitives. 'Keeping a patrol dog trained is a lot more work than just a drug dog. A drug dog I can train just a few times a week, but to keep our patrol dogs trained, we train for five hours every Thursday,' LaChance said. At the Jefferson County Sheriff's Office, two other canine skill sets have been represented.
Now, in addition to drug and patrol dogs, the sheriff's office has a cadaver dog trained to locate dead bodies. 'We have had a bomb dog,' Billingsley said. Before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, there wasn't much of a need for a bomb-sniffing dog, Billingsley said. When the occasion arose to check out a suspicious package, a dog from the Houston Police Department would be called out for the task. 'But since September 11th, we get a lot more calls for suspicious packages. People are just more on the lookout and so now we've got a bomb dog and another bomb dog in training,' Billingsley said. rcmyers@beaumontenterprise.com
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