Interested in how police and emergency service dogs are trained and used? Lots of readers are, and mystery/crime authors often want to include service dogs in their stories, but accurately. Members of the Public Safety Writers Association got a close look at that corner of the world last Saturday from organization Vice-President Steve Ditmars. Ditmars worked many years as a police service dog handler and K-9 Unit supervisor for the Long Beach (Calif.) Police Department and gave a jam-packed Zoom program on the topic.

His first piece of advice was to find out what the policies and procedures are in the locale where you’re writing about, if it’s a real place, in the time period of your fiction. Ways of handling and using dogs vary by jurisdiction, he explained, and these practices change a lot too. If the locale is totally fictional, you have more leeway.

The training process for a police service dog is extensive, but the risk here, he said, is to get so caught up in it, you give Too Much Information. Ditmars has skirted such pitfalls very well in his own books—Big Dogs, Gasping for Air, and a third (coming soon). He finds adding canine characters helps him tell a story, because they enable a variety of perspectives and events. For example, the way someone handles or react to a dog can reveal key aspects of that person’s character.

And, of course, he cautioned authors to be mindful about what happens to the dog. Many readers have a soft spot for Man’s Best Friend, especially when they’ve shown heroism, loyalty, and discipline. You can write a gritty thriller where human lives come to a bad end, but if the dog doesn’t survive the last chapter, you’ll get pushback.

Dogs can be trained to take on many different roles: search and rescue, personal protection, patrol, tracking and trailing people, finding things (narcotics, cadavers, explosives, gas leaks, even from buried pipes). Each of these roles has a different training regimen and relies on dogs’ acute senses of smell and hearing. Ditmars said they are better than humans at pinpointing where a sound is coming from.

Public safety personnel like to use dogs for certain jobs, because it saves time, in, say, searching an area or building. They can be trained to guard suspects until their handler arrives. The threat of a bite is sometimes enough to keep the suspect in place. Dogs are good for departmental public relations too, at open houses and other public events.

Just as new parents “suddenly” notice how many baby products are out there, in a few days after hearing this excellent presentation, I read two stories in which dogs played a role. They were: Doug Crandell’s lively story “Bad Hydrous” in the Sep/Oct 2024 Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and the Sherlock Holmes story, “The Adventure of the Creeping Man.”

Thanks, Steve, for this literary heads up!
Read more about Steve here.