Specially skilled K-9 plays key role in WPD search

Published: Mar. 1, 2018 at 5:40 PM CST
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In its search for Lucas Hernandez, the Wichita Police Department has used a lot of resources from the ground level and above.

One of the strongest tools the department uses is a bloodhound named Blue, who's spent the last couple weeks searching Wichita parks for the missing five-year-old boy.

Blue is valuable, police say, because he does something other K-9s can't.

"Blue is trained in human scent discrimination man-trailing. Every human has a different scent about us, and the trained dog can differentiate those smells and those scents, and follow one person to the exclusion of all others," his owner, Wichita Police Officer Joe Camp explains.

The title given for Blue's specialty is "human scent discrimination."

"Even if a person we're looking for runs through a crowd of people, the scent discriminating dog can follow that one person they're looking for," Camp says. "A lot of dogs are trained in tracking, and they work off of ground disturbance, so they have less input on the individual human scent where that's exclusively what blue is trained in."

Thursday, Camp shows us Blue's training and how he finds people.

A man goes to hide and Blue tracks his scent. The bloodhound walks in a big circle so he can inventory all of the human scents in the area. He sniffs around and takes off. He finds his man, and police hope he can find Lucas too.

"He's been used in other cases as far as lost kids and lost adults and so on finding criminals," says Camp. "We have had success at it in the past and continue to hope to have more success at it."

Blue's special skill led police to offer scent kits for people. So, if your child or elderly parent disappears, dogs like Blue have a scent to track.

"We put it in a storage device that we give the family members, and if something ever happens, we have a pristine scent article for the dogs to utilize," says Camp.

Camp says anyone who would like a scent kit can call him directly at the Wichita Police Department Training Facility at 316-660-3824.