The Connecticut State Police have taken the lead in training police dogs skilled in the art of detecting hidden data. As more and more crimes involve electronic evidence, criminal enforcement agencies throughout the country are recognizing the need to find that evidence quickly. Data detecting dogs help do this by sniffing out chemicals associated with DVD’s, USB drives, hard drives, SD cards, and micro SD cards. The Connecticut State Police started the program in 2012, specially training the first class of three dogs to detect evidence in computers and cell phones. The training is the work of not only the State Police K9 Unit, but also the Connecticut Forensic Lab, where a chemist isolated a chemical compound used to coat memory boards in phones in computers and another chemical compound that exists in DVD’s and CD’s. The K9 unit then trained the dogs to recognize the smell of these compounds. In 2016, the K9 Unit graduated its second class of Electronic Storage Device (ESD) dogs, all Labrador retrievers from Guiding Eyes for the Blind. The ESD dogs are now in the field sniffing out data for law enforcement agencies in Alaska, Missouri, Virginia, and Massachusetts as well as the FBI.
