SPRINGFIELD — Be careful about what you ask for - especially if it has teeth.
I recently approached the Springfield Police Department about taking part in a demonstration with their K-9 unit in which one of their dogs would attack me. Surprisingly, or maybe not so surprisingly, the request was accepted pretty much immediately.
And so, I say, and it is with apologies to my MassLive colleague Nick O'Malley: I got attacked by a police dog so you don't have to.
In the parking lot behind the Boston Road Animal Hospital on Thursday, I donned a padded protective sleeve and stood there while K-9 officer Ryan Carter sicced his dog, Cairo, after me.
If you want to see a police officer's face light up, tell him he's allowed to attack journalists. Carter smiled broadly when I said, "I bet when you came to work today you weren't expecting this."
Given the command by Carter, Cairo, an 80-pound, 3-year-old male German shepherd who seemed fixated on me from the second I donned the protective sleeve, launched himself like a missile right at me. As this was going on – as if in slow-motion – I was aware of, from deep in my subconscious, a voice that sounded curiously like Sheriff Brody in "Jaws" saying "You're going to need a bigger protective sleeve."
Cairo clamped onto the sleeve and would not let go, and began dragging me around the parking lot for several seconds until Carter moved in and gave him the command to stop.
Incidentally, Cairo, as Carter explained later, is not named for the city in Egypt, but for the K-9 that accompanied Seal Team 6 when they took down Osama Bin Laden.
Google would tell me later that an 80-pound German shepherd bites down with about 238 pounds of force. It has one of the strongest jaws of any dog. If you ever had a German shepherd for a pet, and we had one when I was a kid, you know they do not lose games of tug-of-war. Ever.
Without the sleeve, I would undoubtedly have been in pain, bleeding and eager to surrender. While the sleeve spared me from any pain or blood loss, I did get to experience what it is like to wear an 80-pound, growling cuff link.
"If you were a criminal, you're not getting away," said police spokesman Sgt. John Delaney, who is also in command of the police K-9 unit.
K-9 teams perform a myriad of functions within a modern police department. They sniff out drugs, hidden guns and even lost people. They perform crowd control and community service, and they visit children in schools and the elderly in nursing homes.
But make no mistake: When it's go-time, they go. And then they don't let go.
And it is only the dog's handler, in this case Carter, who can say when go-time begins and ends.
Carter has different commands for Cairo, commands for attack, bite and release.
Several times before and during the attack demonstration, he says the word "platz," which appears to be German for "space." Each time, the dog would stop and sit down.
Knowing the secret command code would not do me much good, he said; Cairo is trained to listen only to him.
"We go through several months of training and then take refresher training twice a month," Carter said. And each year, dog and partner need to be recertified to make sure they are functioning effectively. Part of the training involved siccing the dog after someone and then calling him off before he makes contact.
In Massachusetts, police dogs are trained to bite and hold, as opposed to bite and tear or bite and bite and bite.
Carter says in actual arrests, the dogs typically go for the suspect's arms or legs, and not delicate flesh parts on the torso. Even so, he cautioned me to hold the sleeve off to the side of my body and not in front of my midsection.
Police dogs have a "deterrent value," meaning people would rather surrender to police before the dog is let go than afterward, he said.
"People don't want to get bit," he said.
But, as in the recent case in Holyoke where a suspect stabbed a police dog, some people don't care, he said.
"Some guys want to hurt the dogs as much as they want to fight us," he said.