good morning I want to thank everyone for coming this morning we wanted to take the opportunity to introduce you to one of our drug detecting k9 teams from our narcotics and organized crime unit last week officer Devlin and k9 Neko seized a significant amount of methamphetamine which was valued over seven seven hundred fifty thousand dollars over three hundred thousand dosage units and weighed over thirty three pounds today officer Chris Devlin and his k-9 partner Neko are here along with sergeant Chris Kannagi to share information about the unit and the team since many of their investigations are ongoing and long-term in nature they will not be getting into specific details about ongoing or pending cases but they do want to introduce k9 Neko and share some of the information about the important work that they're doing in our community first officer Devlin will talk about his k-9 partner in their work then we will have some time for questions and after that we will have a demonstration with k9 Neko so we'll take a little second for you guys to get organized so that he can search for a hidden item nearby so without further ado I'm gonna introduce Officer deadly are you doing I'm also Chris Devlin with narcotics and organized crime unit this is Nico Nico is a four year old Belgian Malinois we have three drug detection dogs in our unit Nico is trained to find meth heroin and cocaine Nico and I started working together about a year ago I've been working for the drug unit for about 14 years now and about a year ago an opportunity to become a k-9 team with Nico here so Nico came from battleborn k9 at a Las Vegas he was imprinted and trained by Mel English I went down there and spent about three weeks with Mel this is one on one training he was already imprinted and good to go so it was mostly just focused on me came back to Oregon and spent about two months getting trained before we took our first state certification test the state of Oregon requires us to be certified once a year however Portland Police requires us to take this state certification test two times a year so any questions about Nikko or yes so infrared means basically trying to find a certain odor okay so detection dogs can be trained to find any odor whether it's explosives you know like military use it could be weapons it could be cadavers so Nikko was imprinted on the three-drug odors of three main drug odors so his drive he's driven to find those three odors so that he can get rewarded for those three odors so Nico's reward as you saw in the picture as a as a tennis ball Nikko will do anything for a tennis ball he loves tennis balls he's four years old but he still thinks he's a puppy and as you'll see when he gets a tennis ball that just makes his day Nikko does live with at home with me so he I'm around him 24/7 even if I don't want to be sometimes so you know we spend a lot of time together he's my you know partner at work we hang out on the weekends get to go down to the park he's part of our family he goes really good with kids doesn't bite he's really good to take to like community events whether it's children he's very tamed we can come up and you can pull on his tail and he just doesn't care at all so when kids come up and just start yanking on over stepping off his toes it doesn't bother him at all so he's really good to get out and introduce him to the to the public and receiver show show everybody what he can do any other questions okay your question yes yeah okay so our training here I'll have him sit here so his commander in German seats six seats so we train once a week we train for about at least four hours once a week and then we do some quarterly all day trainings and then we do twice a year for the whole state of Oregon all the dogs including patrol dogs when we get together twice a year for a three-day conference so our training we train on everything that we might do which is you know open em open area searches the vehicles rooms packages which is try to get creative in in our training use different sites different new new expose them to new environments different conditions floors weather anything that you can think of to keep to keep us you know at the top of our game so the training is for both of us I would say mostly it's for the handler to recognize what the dog is doing so I can't speak but so but yes once a week we get together with a team in our area and our three drug detection dogs we have Rex chase and Nico and we're fortunate to have an experienced handler on our team Scott Groshong who is a state certified trainer so we're fortunate to have him in our group every Tuesday to help help run those training scenarios Oh odors so some do more on somebody less so that you know there's not not in our area but there are dogs that are trained to sniff out just currency so they have you know currency trained dogs there's cadaver dogs and then there's you know like the airport uses there's there's the bomb dogs they call them the bomb dogs and they'll they can be imprinted up you know up to you know 20 different odors so they have to be proficient and trained on all those different odors so it all depends on what you what your needs are so our needs you know are in our area or meth cocaine and heroin you know unfortunately meth is still the number one problem for for Oregon and specifically Portland so that's really important good question so how do I know when they find something so Neko is a all of our dogs are now passive dogs which means they don't scratch or bite at the target so Neko is also a focused alert dog so he doesn't sit like we see a lot of dogs sit when they find what they're looking for supposed to be looking for he actually just stays on point so he gets as close to the source of odor as possible sometimes he can't get to it but you know it could be you know behind a wall or in a cabinet so he can't actually get to the odor itself so he will focus on the vote that just stay on on point right with you he's crazy huh he'll he'll stay on point right as close as he can get to it and stay there until he gets his reward from me [Music] okay so uh yes a great question so it kind of goes back to our training we trained for large Oh large amounts of odor and small amounts of odor basically what we're trying to do is is utilize it it you know a cane is just a tool for police so we need this we need the dog when we as humans can't physically or you know physically see or smell the drug so a lot of times drug couriers will hide drugs will get creative right they'll have they'll hide them in oil pans in cars or in tires in packages and freights and you know anything anything you can imagine so yeah stay good stay good and to expand on that a lot of the drugs are not only concealed but they're also masked so they'll be wrapped several times in you know vacuum seal or plastic axle-grease this recent one that was on the news the other day I believe had some cocoa powder mixed in on one of the layers of wrapping you know you want to hold this and just stand behind the camera here so to get his attention off of me there we go you can call him there we go all right so so we need the dog to to sniff out that odor that even though a human can't smell it and maybe even a handheld machine can't get can get that odor we can use the dog in those certain situations to help us either build probable cause for warrants lead us in the right direction you know for whatever it is we're doing sorry if he does not bark but that is a some dogs do and he's just he does not bark at me dirty the only time he barks is when I leave if I leave him in the car or at home and I'm and I'm and I leave him alone for a while he'll bark but that's about it and then we'll have an opportunity I think sergeant maybe you might have a little information about some of the unit stats that we can do after the little demonstration so we'll have officer Devlin and Nico gonna search the room for something that we've hidden so if you want to take your cameras off or get prepared however you want to do so it's there's a hidden drug aid on this wall somewhere back in here so we will work from here going that way and you'll be able to see how he works in odor and how he stays on that that drug aid so if you notice his mouth is closed and he's he's sniffing with his nose so if dogs for olfactory is just incredibly strong and you'll see especially when he starts getting into odor will start seeing watch this tail watch his whole body start changing it's closed up completely he's only using his nose right now his mouth closed and we're gonna stay on this spot right about there now he's looking back at me because he wants this tennis ball [Music] [Laughter] [Music] watch out - so yeah there's a great this is just a metal magnet it's empty it has been sitting in a jar with some actual heroin so it has reduced and like Chris mentioned we have three dogs dog teams and last year alone which is actually a little a small year for us the dogs found over seven pounds cocaine sixty six pounds of heroin almost 300 pounds of methamphetamine as well as various other drugs combined with those like chris said and i think we might have a picture to put out later we actually find a ton of other drugs because the drug trafficking organizations package drugs together so in one recent case we found i think 20 pounds methamphetamine but there were seven thousand fake oxycodone pills that contained fentanyl in there as well so there there they haven't figured out to separate the drugs out yet so let's not tell them let's see the total estimated drug value we seized last year was about twenty six million dollars our canine teams did three hundred and nine deployments last year alone so we use them a lot I've got work for Chris to do this afternoon as soon as we leave here and I think that's really kind of just general stuff you guys have any questions about the Narcotics Unit or the dogs I think the commuter talked about in a podcast recently amount of pills that are seasoned how absolutely absolutely can we cease to pick what did we sees around fifty thousand pills last year and not one of them was a legitimate prescription pill meaning they're all fake xanax is oxycodone oxycontin and most of those containing fentanyl so that's a huge issue we're dealing with now a lot of those are coming from overseas or traveling up now through the Mexican southern Mexican border only if we get lucky only if they package them with meth cocaine or heroin so and the other piece of that is it's anything related to that so if narcotics couriers are offering mixing drugs and money together so we find a lot of drug tainted US currency as well that these dogs can find so or any any other paraphernalia that helps with the evidence of the case and like Chris said II can't he probably minimized his role they are critical in what we do the traps fistic ation like he said the oil pans and cars the false walls and houses we would never find that without the dogs yeah Oh F stop my head I'm old it's hard to remember I mean you had the really good one last week is where we had to actually drop put a car on a lift drop the oil pan out and inside the oil pan was it a new fake Department built that we never would have found and we get a lot of those kind of things he's very excited about the drugs right now yeah it's one of the no it's not the biggest Nico has had boy in about nine months it's been certified he's had three or four over thirty pound three pounds or more and then and to be honest these are probably easier for a dog right because there's so much odor what I think's you know a bigger accomplishment is finding the small amount like the couple grams hidden in a car up under a - you know where they really have to work for that not yet this one we can't right now we've still got a lot going on with this case yeah we wouldn't have found it without him as you can see the way it's packaged that like like Chris said it's covered in in cocoa powder there's some of the outer packaging we've already removed but they're pretty sophisticated in the way we they packages I think what's up note is you know this isn't it further investigations a lot of times finding the drugs is really you know kind of even the beginning or middle of their investigations a lot of them are long-term ongoing and they're trying to you know disrupt interdict networks to make it safer for our community members we still have a number of people who've lost their lives and methamphetamine overdoses the opioid epidemic gets a lot of headlines but in Multnomah County methamphetamine is a top killer in our community just it just pardon me heroin so they're all on heroin yeah that the big three is primarily what we focus on no pills we don't have any pill dogs and like Chris said there's money to specific money dogs electronics dogs there's all kinds of but for our unit specific needs it's it's just the big drugs so Chris travels with kress works with us every day we've got on my unit we've got a team of I don't know five or six officers and Chris is there every day so he's not dispatched out he is with us on a day to day basis or our other team like I said there's three the way we're set up there's three canines in our unit and we have to investigative details and those dogs just kind of bounce around with us all day long wherever the work is [Music] this was a planned event yes it was and we had several of these for this specific investigation over the past several months and we anticipate several more very good-sized yeah yeah not the biggest we've ever done but it's it's significant for them it's last street values about $750,000 cut that right there $750,000 we take it out and sell on the street right now now obviously it's these are criminal organizations and it's a business model it's nothing but business to them so each each level you go up higher in the organization the cost is less right it's like buying from a costco warehouse and passing it on down so you know their cost exposures maybe 30% of that 40% of that yeah I mean this is it's it's a huge priority for us in Police Bureau and we're supported wholeheartedly in it so we'll we're out there