History of the K9 Unit
The Battle Creek Police Department was founded in the year 1900. In the last 120 years, the size of the department has grown with the community. Today, the police department patrols an area of roughly 65 square miles, serving over 60,000 residents in the city of Battle Creek and also Bedford Charter Township. In the course of one year, the BCPD responds to approximiately 65,000 calls for service as an agency.
The BCPD started using police trained service dogs, more commonly known as K9’s, in the mid 1990’s. Since the K-9 program started, there have been 20 dogs in service to the department and protecting the community over the past three decades.
Training of the K9 Teams
The K9 dogs are equally trained to serve a dual purpose: Patrol and Narcotic location. What this means is that all the dogs used by the department today are trained to locate narcotics, as well as perform patrol functions with human officers which includes tracking, building and article searches. They also perform a role of officer protection in the field, as well as being quite skilled at suspect apprehension.
Currently the BCPD has four K-9’s in service. Their names are: Nico, Ace, Felix and Bruzer. The human officers who work directly with the K-9’s are known as ‘handlers’. All of the handlers in the BCPD are members of the National Association of Professional Canine Handlers (NAPCH).
The NAPCH serves a role of training, testing, certifying and representing Professional canine handlers across the United States, Canada and Europe. Using this training protocol, the BCPD train locally with the dogs weekly for 4 hours. The training group consists of K9 teams from BCPD, Calhoun County, Barry County, Kalamazoo County, Emmett Township, Sturgis PD and Kalamazoo DPS.
The collective experiences are shared in this preparation, and it brings a wealth of knowledge and familiarity with unique training encounters for all the officers involved. The groups interaction allows them to challenge both the officers and K9’s as the members brainstorm problems, share experiences and come up with new ideas to strenghten the bond of teamwork between the dogs and officers.
Impact on Crime
The BCPD K9 teams not only service the Battle Creek area described above, but they also have mutual aid agreements with other agencies within Calhoun County, and other communities around Southwest Michigan. This allows smaller communties the ability to use their resources to keep their areas safe as well.
The BCPD uses K9’s as essential tools for finding fleeing suspects and for searching dark, narrow spaces for hidden suspects. Dogs have superior night vision and motion visibility than humans, which makes their teamwork crucial for officer safety.
The four K9 teams in service run hundreds of calls per year. These calls range from searching cars or houses for narcotics, tracking homicide or violent suspects, attempting to locate missing persons or taking part in education programs by bringing the dogs into schools to teach students about the importance of the program and how the K9s are used.
In addition to these actions, sometimes having a K9 present on a scene or a traffic stop, even if they are never deployed or used, often prevents a situation from escalating. Simply having the presence of these incredibly trained dogs on the scene can reduce the risk to officers, the public and suspects by deploying the K9’s first into dangerous and unpredictable incidents.
Dogs on Duty: Keeping our Community Safe
It is impossible to assign a value to the K9 teams ability to track a missing person or track down someone who has just committed a violent crime to make the community safer. The dogs that are trained for service in the K9 unit are heroes in our community, and are very dedicated and special members of the police department.
In 2019, one of the K9 dogs named Rushin passed away from a medical condition at the age of 9, after serving since 2013 with the BCPD. During his time with the department, he successfully tracked down one homicide suspect, two attempted murder suspects and three barricaded gunmen, one of which had shot one of the departments own officers. There is a memorial plaque for Rushin at the pavilion at the Home Run Dog Park in honor of his service.
Since 2015, Honor Credit Union has been a sponsor of the BCPD K9 unit, helping to raise funds to acquire new dogs for the program as older ones retire or pass away.
At the upcoming Howl-O-Ween Pawty to be held at the Home Run Dog Park on October 31st, the BCPD will be conducting a special K9 demonstration for those attending, so that you can see these incredible dogs in action. A portion of funds raised at this event from the pet portraits will go to support the project to acquire a new dog for the BCPD K9 unit.
The event is being sponsored by the Friends of Calhoun County Dog Parks, Honor Credit Union, Redbow Photography, Pet Supplies Plus and the Battle Creek Police Department K9 Unit.
If you would like to donate directly to the BCPD K9 Project, please click here.
