Police dogs are valuable assets. Whether they’re tracking and apprehending suspects, sniffing for drugs or explosives, or just humanizing officers at community events, they’ve received substantial training, management and care to develop into loyal partners who can effectively help officers do their jobs. Their value is reflected in the elevated criminal penalties often attached to harming them.
Getting them from Point A to Point B, then, requires more than just stowing them in a backseat. Police canine expert Terry Fleck, a founding member of the Justice Department’s Scientific Working Group on Dog and Orthogonal Detector Guidelines, outlined some key requirements for canine-assigned vehicles in an article for the Eden Consulting Group, which trains police and military handlers. Some key points:
- Virtually all canine teams have dedicated vehicles with cage inserts to hold their dogs. There are several safety-related reasons for this. It contains the dog in an accident; prevents accidental bites; allows quicker and safer care of the driver/handler if they’re injured; and makes the team immediately available 24/7. “I have never seen a police dog get out of a properly secured canine insert,” Fleck noted. “I have seen police dogs break out glass windows, etc., where no canine insert has been in place.”
- Canine teams often carry additional equipment for their dogs and the safety of the team. This can include firearms, training aids and more. Such items need to be safely stored and securely transported.
- Canine inserts require an investment but are long-lasting and require little to no maintenance, making them cost-effective.
- Due to both space and bite risks, prisoners shouldn’t be transported in canine vehicles.
- Per federal law, enclosures to transport live dogs must be large enough to allow the animals to lie naturally, stand and sit erect, and turn around.
Even cages for larger dogs, though, can leave a lot of unused space in the backseat – space that today’s officers, who have a lot more equipment and gear to carry than their predecessors, may better use for other purposes.
The new Super Max K-9 unit from Setina helps them make better use of it. It adds a safe and humane canine-transport capability to the additional storage options offered by the company’s Transportation Max (Trans Max) and Super Max systems.
“We all know officers are being asked to carry more and more equipment,” said Brett Ware, the company’s national sales manager. “Just like we did for single-prisoner transport with the Trans Max, we’re taking some of that backseat space and devoting it to cargo, but now adding to it the canine transport capability.”
K-9 SOLUTION REFLECTS CLIENT NEEDS
Initially developed for crew cab pickups and then expanded to SUVs, the Trans Max provides secure single-prisoner transport and additional customizable interior storage in an integrated unit. A durable polycarbonate wall keeps prisoner and cargo separated, and the added storage features a heavy-duty pull-out cargo drawer, integrated bay for radios and electronics and aluminum driver’s-side door panel. A single-prisoner transport seat with the company’s signature SmartBelt restraint system is included with Dodge and GM trucks.
The Super Max upgrade adds an upper storage deck, passenger-side door panels, and side and rear window barriers. Both models are built with steel skeletons and aircraft-grade aluminum to maximize strength and light weight, and tie-down points keep everything secure.
The K-9 addition came about through feedback from clients, industry contacts and law enforcement professionals in the company’s sphere. It is currently or will soon be available for all police package vehicles (SUVs and crew cabs).
“Especially locally, we work with canine handlers, and then also attend trade shows, make sales calls and things like that,” said Ware. “The folks we talked to indicated an increased need for cargo space and a desire to help keep the canine calm and address its anxiety.”
There’s an interesting balance to that. While the law requires certain minimum space for transported dogs, providing them too much space, handlers report, may contribute to agitation.
“These are such high-drive dogs that if you give them too much space, they can start to spin and kind of work themselves up,” Ware explained. “They get anxious if you give them too much space. So some of the feedback we got from handlers is, ‘Hey, it’s great you can offer the whole back seat, but really we want to keep them more contained.’”
The Super Max K-9’s cargo drawer can hold most long guns up to a conventional Remington 870 with an 18-inch barrel. All Setina K-9 transport solutions feature nonslip rubber mats and optional window fans for cooling. The company also offers the Ultimate K-9 II insert system, retrofitting for K-9 transport and complementary products such as kennel fans and temperature-monitoring systems.
PROTECT A VALUABLE ASSET
In the post-George Floyd era, police dogs have only grown in importance. Beyond their specific capabilities in searching and tracking, they can represent an effective less-lethal force option for controlling uncooperative suspects.
But as important as K-9 units can be to law enforcement, the nicest and newest vehicles haven’t always been dedicated to them. Upfitting departments’ well-worn K-9 cars was how Setina – which created the first police vehicle partition in 1963 – first came to focus on the needs of dog teams.
“Years ago the K-9 vehicles were mileaged-out cars – old patrol cars – because dogs would make a mess of the car, and nobody wanted to devote a brand-new car to a dog,” recalled Ware, who’s been part of the family-owned business for more than 20 years. “They’d come to us with a vehicle – one that very often had our partition in it – and ask, ‘Hey, can you build something for us to put a dog in here rather than a prisoner?’ So we’d leave the partition in to act as the front wall and accomplish our goal of reinforcing the vehicle, which has always been our priority.”
Experience showed that dogs can scratch up powder coating and urine corrodes steel, so current construction uses aircraft-grade aluminum. And as the dogs have become increasingly recognized for the valuable role they can play on law enforcement teams, the vehicles that carry them have upgraded considerably in quality and investment.
“As budgets got better and K-9s become more prevalent, we started seeing brand-new professional K-9 units,” Ware added. “That’s kind of how we evolved from building a basic conversion kit to, essentially, a fully built professional K-9 unit, which is where we’re at today.”
For more information, visit Setina.
