We Are the Cops by Michael Matthews Read Free Book Online Page B

quiet and seemed to have little to tell me. That happened sometimes.
    I asked him about his career and in particular, the various roles he had taken on, in an attempt to find something we could discuss. He casually mentioned that he had been a K-9 handler and I was about to skip onto something else when suddenly he started talking. And he didn’t stop talking – or smiling. The officer’s face beamed as he talked about his dog and it was obvious just how much his dog had become a part of his career. For some other officers I spoke with, it was career defining.
    Obviously many of these dogs are genuinely brave and smart but it was when one particular officer was telling me about just how incredibly stupid his dog was, that I became struck by what was a real sense of loyalty, not just dog to handler, but handler to dog. The crazier the dog behaved, it seemed, the bigger the grin that would develop across the officer’s face as he recounted past glorious – and not so glorious – incidents.
    In many states across America, K-9’s – police dogs – carry the same status as police officers themselves. Many dogs will even have their own badge. Each year, many police officers are killed in the line of duty in the United States. Many K-9s are too and each year the duty deaths for police dogs, reaches double figures. To their handlers, to their departments and to their fellow officers, police dogs are one of the team.

    I’d just become a K-9 officer - one of the first that the department had had for years - and I had this dog that was a ‘green’ dog, which means it can’t do anything; it can bite the shit out of you and that’s about it.
    That dog just ate me alive for about eight week on the training course until they eventually got rid of it. I still have the scars to prove it. He didn’t like to give up his toy and he didn’t like to release when it came to the bite work. He would get pissed off – like, ‘you’re taking something away from me and I don’tlike it!’ So his way of lashing out was to bite the shit out of me. I liked the dog but I didn’t like the fact that he was biting me all the time.
    So they got rid of that dog and they got me a second dog. I had him for a week but that dog didn’t bite. So then I get my third dog. This one was ‘titled’ and it did everything that I needed it to do. Then about a month later I ended up getting bit by another dog, on the hand, just a few days before we graduated. We were doing release work and I was wearing a training sleeve, which had an open end with a wooden dowel on the inside so that you could hold onto it and it wouldn’t get pulled off your hand. But the dog came up, missed my arm and caught my hand and just ripped the skin, basically. So I was out of work for four months. I had an infection, so the skin didn’t heal and I had this big, giant hole in my knuckle.
    So after four months I go back to work and I’m on the streets with my dog and one night he was supposed to bite somebody but when I gave him the command, he kind of looked at me like, ‘bite who?’ That was the icing on the cake for me and that dog.
    So I got rid of him and I called the trainer the next day and I told him about the incident and he said he’d call the broker, who was the guy who would get dogs for our department.
    I said, ‘Look, I’m about ready to put a fucking bullet into this dog and throw him in the fucking river. This is bullshit. He ain’t worth a damn. He’s taking up space in the back of the car.’
    So I told them that I wanted a Malinois. I ain’t fucking around this time. So I get this Malinois and it was a total retard –I probably shouldn’t have been in K-9 because I had nothing but issues. Anyway, I get this dog and the head trainer says to me, ‘I hope they give you a pretty decent sized Malinois because you’re so tall.’
    Well, he gets this motherfucker out and it’s a standard sized Malinois. Forty-four pounds. And it’s sick, you could