Officer Rex had illustrious career in Washington

    The Washington Police Department bade farewell to a trustworthy companion this month. Rex, the department?s 14-year-old dog who was beloved by the community, was put to sleep in early November. The dog served on the force for 10 years from 2000 until his partial retirement earlier this year.

    Rex was the department?s first dog. He was a Belgian Malanois and was born in the Netherlands, where he received his training in basic commands. Rex was sent to the United States to be trained as a police dog. Because his initial instruction was in Dutch, his trainers decided to teach his handler the Dutch commands rather than to teach Rex new commands in English. That handler was Washington Police Officer Brett Sorrells, who runs the department?s canine unit.

    Sorrells met Rex at a canine training course in Indiana in 2000. The two trained together there for five weeks before Rex was admitted to the force in Washington. Sorrells said he made an effort to practice drills with Rex every day while the two worked together.

    Police Chief Greg Goodman said Rex was a great asset on the force, not just for his work finding drugs but also in his relations with the public. 

    ?Brett and Rex did 128 presentations to the public,? said Goodman. ?There are tons of school kids who know Rex. Rex was the type of dog that when Brett would go in and do a presentation, he could let Rex loose because he loved the kids.?

    Sorrells remarked, ?The kids always wanted to play ball with him.?

    ?Rex was a really friendly dog,? said Goodman. ?He was a perfect dog for us.?

    Rex had a serious side, too. He was trained to sniff out drugs, and was taken on 246 narcotic searches in his career. He went on 10 search-and-rescue missions, and was involved in 22 tracking situations, in which he had to pick up on someone?s scent and follow the person. He was also involved in 29 SWAT Team operations, which occasionally involved subduing a suspect by force.

    Goodman remarked, ?We don?t have a lot of bites because people don?t want to mess with the dog. When the dog shows up, things seem to calm down.?

    He continued, ?When he was doing what he was supposed to do, you would not want to be on the bad end of Rex. Rex could knock you right off your feet.? 

    Goodman and Sorrells said that Rex could sense the difference between a training exercise and the real thing.

    ?A lot of it is body language,? said Sorrells. ?The dogs pick up on your body language. In a school setting, you?re more relaxed. They know when you?re going in, and things are lax, it feels different from something real where you might be tense.?

    ?Rex always picked up when we were training, and I don?t know if it was because he got bored with it,? said Goodman. ?When it was the real thing, he was a whole different dog. He knew that this was business and that we?re not playing anymore.?

    How are dogs taught to search for drugs or other items of interest to police? Sorrells said dogs have natural abilities to seek and find prey. The police simply turn their prey into a reward, which in Rex?s case was a tennis ball. The ball is scented with narcotics, so the dog learns to associate the smell of narcotics with the toy.

    Sorrells also trained Rex to search for other items besides drugs. What he did was to take an article, such as a shotgun shell, a key or a knife, and scent it with human odor. Then he took that item to a field and put it in the grass. 

    ?That?s when I gave the dog the search command,? he said. ?The dog looks for it, and when the dog gets into odor, they show a change of character. As soon as he would get in odor, I could read that, and give him the ?sick?em? command. It?s not a specific thing they?re looking for, just something with human odor.? 

For more, see our Nov. 22 print edition.