(K-LOVE Closer Look) – Dogs trained to sniff out electronics are partnering with local police, searching for evidence at suspected sites of child abuse and trafficking. Common digital storage devices such as SDcards or thumb drives contain a miniscule amount of a essential chemicals which they can easily smell.
Defenders for Children, a non-profit organization based in Greenville, South Carolina gifts the special K9s to law enforcement. Founder and executive director Tony Clark launched the organization in 2010 with a group of friends when she heard their town had the highest rates of child sexual abuse in the state. “That was shocking,” she says. “The community was not talking about this problem. And at that time, we knew we were going to be a solution by creating a nonprofit -- which we had no idea what we were doing at that time -- but we were going to do what we can to stop what was happening to the children."
These K9 super-sniffers gained national recognition with the arrest of notorious offender Jared Fogle of Subway in August 2015, when a labrador named Bear found crucial thumb-drive evidence of child pornography in the man’s home.
On average, a dog can find 2-3 devices human investigators missed.
"That's an example of why the dogs are needed,” Clark says, “because law enforcement is missing devices - and we know it.”
Defenders for Children continues to expand its canine program beyond South Carolina, actively working to place dogs in other states, most recently Georgia, to combat the mobility of these criminal enterprises.
"We're trying to get the dogs everywhere. We recently launched into Atlanta, which is huge because everybody knows that's like a hub of trafficking -- and they will travel.”
