K9 Investigation Errors

This book replaces K9 Fraud: Fraudulent Handeling of Police Search Dogs

Make sure your K9 investigation work holds up in court. Based on Resi and Ruud’s previous book, K9 Fraud, with updated content and a new chapter.

Learn how to:

• Avoid the most common mistakes handlers make.
• Become a better trainer and handler with a scientific understanding of scent and tracking work.
• Train your dog for scent-identification lineups using the scientifically proven Dutch standard.

Faulty K9 investigations often have serious consequences: the guilty might walk free, and the innocent might suffer. Internationally recognized dog handlers and trainers Dr. Resi Gerritsen and Ruud Haak use real-life case studies—historical and recent—to highlight K9 errors that can derail entire investigations. Each of these mistakes, such as influencing your dog’s results or relying on contaminated scents, damages your reputation and the value of your work. But with the right knowledge and training protocols, you can minimize investigation errors.

K9 errors have hampered investigations from the earliest uses of dogs for police work in Europe to twenty-first century cases such as the 2001 anthrax attacks in the United States. Don’t let the same mistakes happen to you and your team.

Table of Contents

Introduction
1. Scent-identification lineups
2. The Dutch training method for scent identification
3. Dogs’ responsiveness to human gestures
4. Tracking dogs in crime investigation
5. Scent research and tracking experiments
6. Errors in mantrailing
7. Human odor and dogs’ scent perception
8. Scent problems and training problems
9. Preventing investigation errors

About the Authors

Dr. Resi Gerritsen and Ruud Haak are world-renowned specialists in K9 training and the authors of more than 30 titles on dog training. They train search and rescue dogs for the International Red Cross and the United Nations (Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs), and they have trained drug and explosive detector dogs for the Dutch police and the Royal Netherlands Air Force. Gerritsen and Haak also serve as judges for the International Rescue Dog Organization.