Buffalo K-9 Cops: Gone to the Dogs
Patricia Abbatoy
Riverside Review
Photo caption: Former K-9 Cop, Ron Conrad and his partner, Bonny.
In a controversial move, the Buffalo Police Department decided last Spring (1999) to significantly reduce the size of its K-9 Division from nine officers to three. The reason given was that the unit was not cost effective, even though months earlier the police department spent taxpayer dollars to purchase four additional dogs.
What happened? Was it greed on the part of some K-9 officers who wanted back pay and overtime? Or was it a power struggle between police brass and PBA officials using the union contract as their fulcrum? One year later, the only fact that isn't in dispute is that the K-9 unit was costly.
Chief of Patrol Lawrence Ramunno elaborated: "...vet bills were paid for at the city's expense (and kennels were built in the officers' backyards). The city also paid for the dogs' food each month, and gave each officer a police vehicle to take home with them.According to former Assistant Corporation Counsel and current Director of Labor Relations for the City of Buffalo, Kathleen O'Hara, some of the officers were receiving an annual stipend to cover the costs of maintaining the dogs in their homes.
"They felt this was inadequate," she said, and they filed a lawsuit seeking a daily stipend. The officers won their lawsuit against the city. O'Hara says some even received back pay.
The Common Council considered cutting the K-9 unit.
At a November 10, 1998 meeting at Polish Cadets Hall, former Council Member Dale Zuchlewski said the council agreed to the purchase of more dogs because "they were given a commitment" from the police department, in writing, that not only would the dogs be narcotic dogs, "they would be assigned to the districts once they were trained, and they were suppose to be in the districts in June (1998). D-district was supposed to get two."
Chief Ramunno confirmed this: "We wanted every district to have two dogs, one for days, and one for nights. We wanted to assign them to the districts with the Inspector of each district placing them where they were most needed," he said.
The ultimate decision to "abolish the dogs" boiled down to overtime pay. He explained that according to the union contract, if a K-9 officer in one district had to be temporarily assigned to another district, the police department would have to pay him or her overtime. (An independent arbitrator determined last week that officers can be temporarily detailed to other districts.)
Police Commissioner Rocco Diina and his staff also wanted the officers to do foot patrols. This too proved problematic. There were complaints that K-9 dogs often sat in the back seats of patrol cars while their handlers directed traffic (the K-9 Division worked out of the Traffic Division) and "certain dogs weren't good to walk a beat," Ramunno said. Their temperaments "were not conducive to working with crowds." Two of the dogs in the K-9 Division were aggressive and reportedly bit people.
The department's Public Information Officer, Lt. Larry Baehre, said as K-9 dogs become "more specialized" in the tasks they are able to perform, law enforcement agencies are utilizing them less often for crowd control.
"We really don't use (the dogs) for crowd control (anymore) he said.
The REVIEW recently spoke with a former K-9 cop to get his perspective.
Ron Conrad, a 28-year veteran with the police department and Riverside resident, feels the K-9 dogs were "very effective" at crowd control. While some people won't take notice of even the most formidable looking cop, a police dog can grab immediate attention."Some people are just terrified by dogs," he said simply.
"Bonny and I responded to a call one time at a comedy club on Main Street. There were about 800-1,000 people in the parking lot. I walked up to the lieutenant in charge and asked him if he wanted Bonny and me to clear the place out... As soon as Bonny and I got out of the car, it was like Moses parting the Red Sea," as he described it. Several weapons were confiscated.
There's a myth that K-9 dogs are only vicious animals trained to attack people. This is not true.A trained dog will only bite when she or he is given a command to. And unlike a dog that has been abused and frightened, a trained dog like Bonny won't charge after you barking and growling. You won't even see her coming.
"She'll come at you like a stealth missile," Conrad says.
Ron and Bonny patrolled the city together, including Tonawanda Street from Ontario to Vulcan.
As they patrolled the streets Ron frequently told kids, "I don't care where you go or where you congregate, just get off the corners," he emphasized, echoing the feelings of many local residents and business owners.
When Ron was asked to become a K-9 officer (the head trainer at the time) Paul Koenig, was sent to Indiana to purchase the dogs and train with them, so he in turn could teach other officers to work with the dogs.
When he returned, the officers and their four-legged partners went through six months of training. The dogs were taught how to jump obstacles, go through windows, run through drainpipes, walk on high platforms and search buildings and cars for drugs. Some handlers had to learn how to issue commands in foreign languages. One of the dogs, Endo, is originally from Czechoslovakia.
Bonny is a four-year-old Dutch Mallinois from the Netherlands.
She was trained to search for a variety of drugs (marijuana, heroin, cocaine through an interesting game.An officer hides a dog's toy with a small amount of narcotics. Eventually the dog associates the smell of narcotics with his or her toy.
Ron gave a demonstration of this with Bonny. He hid her toy under a pillow in the sofa in his home and told her to rovere or search. Bonny fervently sniffed around the apartment until she found her toy.
Of the four new K-9 officers he was the only one assigned to work evenings. "When I was out there, I was active with the dog," he said. And they did much more than control crowds. They also searched buildings and vehicles for narcotics. A K-9 is able to search a house or vehicle for drugs faster than a police officer alone.
The two also provided cover for sector cars on such calls as domestic disputes.
"(Bonny was) very effective" in domestics, he said.
Ron Conrad worked as a K-9 officer for eight months before the unit was virtually eliminated last spring.
The decision to cut the K-9 Division was the first of many bitter clashes between Commissioner Diina and Buffalo cops.
K-9 officers protested Diina's decision and went before the Common Council to plead their case. According to Lt. Baehre, the officers filed a grievance, but an arbitrator, he said, determined the commissioner had the authority to cut the size of the K-9 Division.
What did the Buffalo Police Department do with these highly trained dogs once the unit was reduced? Commissioner Diina, according to one source, recommended giving former K-9 officers the option of purchasing them for one dollar.
Chief Ramunno explained the rationale for selling the dogs to the officers: the dogs were city property and the department couldn't just give them away.
"There had to be a monetary exchange for the dogs," he said.Police sources estimate the dogs cost the city between $1,000 and $7,000 each. Neither Chief Ramunno nor Lt. Baehre could say how much the dogs were purchased for, or if these figures include the costs of maintaining the dogs. One source claims the operating costs for the unit ranged between $45,000 and $100,000.
Of the remaining dogs in the Buffalo Police K-9 Division, two are bomb dogs and one is a narcotic dog.
All things considered, was the decision to cut the K-9 Division in the best interest of the taxpayers and citizens of Buffalo? It depends on whom you ask.
"This could have been an exceptional unit. You had four new people who wanted to do nothing but work," Ron Conrad concluded.
He didn't particularly care whether he received a stipend to care for Bonny as long as the city paid for her veterinary care and supplies. In fact, he continues to train Bonny with other law enforcement agencies on his own time and at his own expense. Bonny went through training nine times between September and December of 1999 and is certified for three more years.
North District Council Member Joe Golombek, Jr. feels "each district should have one K-9 officer assigned to it." Whether the unit works out of the Traffic Division with officers assigned district duties, or directly out of a district station house doesn't matter to him.
"It was a mistake for a city our size to reduce the K-9 Unit so drastically. An 80% cut in the K-9 Unit was unacceptable," Golombek told the REVIEW.
Conversely, Lt. Baehre said the nationwide trend in law enforcement is towards smaller K-9 units, but admits that opinion on this subject fluctuates.
How will the Buffalo P.D. handle a state of emergency with such a small K-9 unit? Lt. Baehre says "other dogs" can be utilized. For example, the Secret Service had K-9s which may have been used to search area buildings prior to the arrival of presidential candidates before a recent election.We asked Chief Ramunno if he felt the limited size of the Buffalo K-9 Division posed any hardship for either the police department or the public during the past year.
His answer? "We have not suffered one bit, at all."
Is there any hope the K-9 will ever be restored? The inability of the department to temporarily assign officers to other districts (a practice known as detailing) and the matter of overtime was the crux of the K-9 controversy and many union/management disputes within the Buffalo Police Department, according to Chief Ramunno.
One former city official, who asked to remain anonymous, said, "there are seven or eight conditions which would give the department the flexibility to transfer officers from district to district," if, he surmised, "certain hard headed people would push a little."
