Criminal - Officer Talon

Episode Date: October 30, 2015

Corporal Scott Foster of the Hillsborough, NC Police Department worked closely with his K-9 partner, Talon, for many years. They located weapons and narcotics, tracked suspects through dark woods, and went home together after work. But when Talon was injured on the job and had to retire early, Corporal Foster was paired with a new dog and life got a lot more complicated. Watch Phoebe get attacked by a police dog: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aRYkHA98MzY Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family.

Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts. Support for this show is brought to you by Nissan Kicks. It's never too late to try new things, and it's never too late to reinvent yourself. The all-new reimagined Nissan Kicks is the city-sized crossover vehicle that's been completely revamped for urban adventure. From the design and styling to the performance, all the way to features like the Bose Personal Plus sound system,

you can get closer to everything you love about city life in the all-new, reimagined Nissan Kicks. Learn more at www.nissanusa.com slash 2025 dash kicks. Available feature, Bose is a registered trademark of the Bose Corporation. In this situation, we're going to say that this is a vehicle that got pursued. It was a stolen vehicle that had a wanted person in it who had just robbed a store and victimized somebody. This is Corporal Scott Foster of the Hillsborough, North Carolina Police Department. In this person's wild dash to get away, they came to this really rural type area. They can't go anywhere else in the vehicle.

You've got a big pond on one side and woods all the way around. The natural instinct is going to be that they're going to get out and jump and run on foot. We met him on a gigantic empty piece of land in a town called Swepsonville. And before we met, he wrote to tell us it would probably be a good idea to wear comfortable shoes. So you're going to play the part of the bad guy now and you're actually going to run on foot. Lauren, who produces the show, took off running into the woods and hid. I'm going to grab Vader and come back here, and you can play the part as my cover officer as we enter in these woods and actually locate her. It was like a high-stakes game of hide-and-go-seek in these huge, dense woods.

But all the looking was being done by a $12,000 German shepherd from Slovakia. So he just smelled the gauze that Lauren was wearing. That's to indicate to him that that is the odor that we're going to be following. So in real life, officers will often rub the seat of the driver's car with a piece of gauze to transfer the suspect's smell. I'll introduce it to him one more time, and then we will be off and ready to go. When Vader tracks someone, he wears a special dog vest that signals to him that it's time to go tracking. The minute the vest was on, Vader got to work. His nose was glued to the ground, and I was running after him with a recorder.

And this, it's kind of fast. It is fast. I mean we're not just strolling here. No, we're not strolling. If you'll notice his body, see how his nose is to the ground? He's not even looking up. He's not even looking up. Because his eyes don't really matter. It's his nose, exactly. In this environment she could be anywhere. Notice his pace is picking up a little bit. I know, we're trying to keep up with Vader. See his head coming up? See how he's looking? That indicates to me that he's actually smelling her at this point.

Within a certain distance, the dogs don't need to track anymore. They can smell the actual hiding person and go right to them. Good boy, baby! Good boy! Good boy! It's hard for me to catch up with you all. So he found her. He did find her. He actually came right to her. So from the point of view of a person who's running, it makes me feel like you, if I were a criminal, you're screwed.

You're screwed. There's no way. Exactly. There's no getting away. Yeah. And a lot of times what will happen is they will initially run a short distance and hide. And then they'll see us coming. And they're like, how are they finding me? And they'll run a little further, and then they'll hide.

And that's when the panic sits in. And what they don't realize is the more panic and adrenaline they get off, the easier they're actually making our job. The more smell. The more smell, exactly. The more smell. But if you could imagine that track at 3 o'clock in the morning, in the dark, just officers looking.

There's no way. We tracked Lauren about a quarter of a mile, and Vader found her in less than three minutes. In the daylight and in a trained scenario, it's fun and almost amazing to do this, but it adds a whole different element when you're hunting a non-armed bad guy because anyone with a gun could have shot at us so the ability to be ambushed is so great and unfortunately here in North Carolina just a little over a year ago a handler by the name of Jason Crisp was tracking a domestic violence suspect and got within about 30 yards of him and he shot and killed both the handler and the dog

with a shotgun. So it's something you have to keep in the back of your mind, but you also have to have a lot of trust in your dog to know that you're going to be able to read those behaviors and safely be able to come out of the woods. So when he finds someone in the woods or is chasing someone down, what would they do? Even though we look at them as locating tools, they can be deployed for, uh, compliance, but it's pain compliance. Meaning when they bite, they don't maul someone. They don't tear them up. They're trained to bite and hold with a lot of pressure. And one of the things that makes them better than any other tool we have is we can recall them. If we deploy a gun or a taser

or even pepper spray, once we make that decision to deploy it, there's no pulling it back. The dogs, we can do that. That's one thing we train. They're the only tool we have that we can actually do that with. Scott and his fellow officers meet every week to train their dogs. They're required to train at least 16 hours each month. On the day we met up with them, there were six human officers and six canine officers. It's very interesting. All of these, we're here with not just you, but with a lot of different people from the Sheriff's Department of Ambulance. But they all have their dogs' names on the windows. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I think that's kind of interesting because,

you know, people a lot of times think that these dogs are just sort of a piece of equipment. You know, it always shocks me when I hear that. But, you know, I talk to people and one of the questions they always ask me is, you know, does he go home with you or are you his only handler? And, you know, to me it sounds so crazy to even think that possibly someone else could handle him. But it dawned on me the general public don't really know that. They think that the dog could be handled by anybody in the department. And, you know, it's so far from the case. naturally as handlers you get bonded to these dogs they're like family members so sometimes i think the the names on the car is just a spilling over of that you know

you're proud of these dogs you want people to know hey that's brit that's falco that's vader that's talon so i think that's a lot of times how that comes in. Suspect, come out with a voice. What? I wasn't doing nothing. I have a trained police dog. You need to do what I say, do it now. I wasn't doing anything. Go ahead. Suspect, stop. Run around and release my dog. They were acting as decoy suspects for one another,

even shooting blanks to desensitize the dogs to the sound of loud gunfire. Suspect, show it in your head! But we thought the wildest thing they did was put on a huge padded suit with about two inches of padding all the way around. And the officers get bit by each other's dogs. Oh my gosh, this looks like, okay. Whose dog's coming up for this? Falco. So you've got the, he's got the whole suit on.

He does. How is the dog, the dog is just going to get him wherever he wants? Not necessarily. We do teach our dogs to target. We have different areas we want them to target that's going to do minimal amount of damage. Typically we like them to target inner bicep, outer forearm, calf, or back of the thigh. We try to keep them away from areas, or triceps. We try to keep them away from anywhere where there's nice veins and stuff,

arteries and stuff that we don't want to be damaged. See his full mouth? See how deeply that's in there? The force is coming from the back of his teeth. The damage is caused by the front of the teeth. So we actually train that. What's amazing about watching the dogs bite is that once they've closed their back teeth, they don't move. Even if the decoy hits them or swings them all over the place, the dog holds steady.

So the dog is like off the ground, he's just holding on with his mouth. Yeah, exactly. The dog won't release until he gets the command, and then he stands guard. So this is like the dogs working as your partner? Exactly. Even spending half a day with them, it's obvious that these highly trained dogs can absolutely do things that a human being never could. It also became obvious pretty quickly that this wasn't going to be just a story about how effective police dogs can be. It was about something else.

Because long before Vader, Scott had a different partner, his original partner. And now all three of them live together in a sort of complicated canine love triangle, complete with sneaking around and feeling guilty. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. He's 10 years old. We were paired together when he was about 16 months old. We went to Scott's house to meet his original partner, Talon. Talon is enormous, much bigger and sturdier-seeming than Vader. Talon's really awesome. I can't help but just smile any time I talk about Talon.

I'd like to say it was immediately a match made in heaven, but that really wasn't the case. He was a dominant dog, and it took a lot for us to get that bonding process down. But when we finally did, we were pretty much inseparable. And so who is he out here with? That's actually my personal dog. That's also a shepherd from Europe, and her name's Dutch.

I got her early on, not so much to train, but just whenever we're off duty. I like Talon to fully be able to relax so he could have a true home life as opposed to just feeling like a little furry robot that kind of would go to work and work and then come home and just be put in a kennel. So I actually got her just to kind of give him some companionship and a pet-like experience whenever he was off duty. Scott's house and yard are fully equipped to accommodate his dogs.

He has five in total, the two police dogs, Dutch, and then two tiny white lap dogs that live inside. Their names are Wicket and Cricket, but Talon was first. One time in particular, I can really remember very clearly, we had tracked a person who had robbed a convenience store, and he had wrecked his car and ran, much like the scenario we just did. And at this point, we had tracked a great distance. I know Talon was really tired. I was exhausted. We had lost our cover officers.

And I think a lot of people who were assisting had kind of given up faith that we were going to catch this guy. And I was just having conversations with Talon, real heartfelt conversations. I really wanted to catch this guy bad. What does a heartfelt conversation with Talon sound like? You're good enough to do this.

You know, we've done this in training. You know, we've been in these situations before. Just not panic, but kind of like a father encouraging a son in the big game. You know, halftime, you know, we're down by 10 and I'm trying to encourage him. You can come back. You can still get him. And through this conversation I was having with him, I was referencing the bad guy as him. I kept saying, we'll get him. You can get him. And all of a sudden the guy stood up. He was hiding under some kudzu about 25 foot from

where we were at. And he said, you've already got him. I'm right here. That was really a proud moment just because everything that I was expressing to Talon through telling him, you can do this, you can do this, he had actually already done it. The guy was right there with us, and that's why we hadn't went any further. He hadn't lost him. It's just that we were literally right on top of him. I told Scott when we arrived that I was a little afraid of dogs. Scott said he could tell that I was standing a little stiffly, and that Talon could pick up on it too.

Oh my God. Hello. Talon, come on in. His commands are in check. And where that comes from is with them getting most of their initial training up until that 12 to 14 months, being in Europe, it was only natural that they trained them in those languages. So when they come here, rather than trying to change that, ideally, and I say ideally because it don't

always work, is to teach the handler the Czech commands. So I probably speak more of a southern Czech. If anybody's listening to this, they may not even understand what I'm saying, but he fully understands it. And an added benefit is it also allows us to give them commands on the street without people, especially bad guys, knowing exactly what we're telling them. So could you demonstrate some of your Czech? My Southern Czech. Talon, come on. Good boy. So Talon, who Lauren had been playing with the whole time, suddenly sat right at her feet, looked her straight in the eyes, and barked. A lot.

Just because Scott had told him to. And so basically what that was, if you'll notice, he was kind of rather unnervingly keying up on Lauren. I had him do it instead of you, Phoebe, for a reason. I was afraid Phoebe may drop the mic and take off running, but it's just because it's a trained response. Okay. Now you can see just his personality completely changes to where he goes more of that neutral type. You can pet me. It's okay. If you don't, you know, it's kind of okay also, but I'm not mad at you after the last command that, you know, my daddy gave you. It's just because he was telling me what to do.

Support for Criminal comes from Apple Podcasts. Each month, Apple Podcasts highlights one series worth your attention, and they call these series essentials. This month, they recommend Wondery's Ghost Story, a seven-part series that follows journalist Tristan Redman as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving Redmond as he tries to get to the bottom of a ghostly presence in his childhood home. His investigation takes him on a journey involving homicide detectives, ghost hunters, and even psychic mediums, and leads him to a dark secret about his own family. Check out Ghost Story, a series essential pick, completely ad-free on Apple Podcasts.

Support for this show is brought to you by Nissan Kicks. on Apple Podcasts. and styling to the performance, all the way to features like the Bose Personal Plus sound system. You can get closer to everything you love about city life in the all-new, reimagined Nissan Kicks. Learn more at www.nissanusa.com slash 2025 dash kicks. Available feature, Bose is a registered trademark of the Bose Corporation. After eight years with the Hillsborough Police Department, Talon had to retire from service early after he got hurt when he and Scott were tracking a suspect and Talon followed his nose right into an attic. As you all know, when you walk in an attic, you have to walk on the ceiling joists or you fall through. Talon wasn't able to make that be that reasonable and fell through the ceiling and

actually hurt his leg. He was okay for a while, but then arthritis started showing. And even if you'll notice today, he's got a little limp in that front leg. So we had to retire him early. The town of Hillsborough held a retirement ceremony for Talon in January of this year, where he was presented with a plaque and a bone, and then Talon was officially given to Scott by the town. He wasn't just Talon the dog. He was officer, canine officer Talon. He interacted with people,

and he was so successful over the course of his career that I think the initial thought was, you know, how's another dog even going to come close to replacing Talon because he was so good? And then came Vader. Vader officially began his work as Talon's replacement in September. Talon stays home now. He has his pal Dutch to keep him company. But even she's impressed by the new guy.

For so long, I think she looked at Talon truly as an alpha. But then here comes Vader, this new, young, strong, energetic dog. It's interesting to maybe kind of see and wonder where her true loyalty lies now. Oh, that's kind of sad. It is kind of sad. Sometimes I feel like Vader took Talon's job and his woman, you know, all in one quick, you know, swoop. Have Talon and Vader ever met each other? They have. If you'll notice, Vader's got a scar on his nose and Talon does too. That was the result of them actually meeting each other. They went crazy. Yeah, exactly. They immediately fought. I tried to integrate them early on where

I would cradle near each other. And I tried to do all the different things like they say when you enter a new dog to the family. But the problem is those type recommendations aren't for police working dogs it may work with some dogs but these dogs are such high alpha males and you know they they think that they are absolutely at the top you know for another dog who equally thinks that to challenge them you know it's always just about going to be a fight I bet you complicate things too I do yeah I actually do complicate things a great deal because they both want you to like them the best exactly and for so long I was I was truly the super alpha to both of them that you know when the two get together I'm almost torn a bit so it works out best just to keep them completely

separated I think eventually I could probably put them together, but I think what that would require would be Talon taking a step down. I just really hate to do that to him. Can you imagine if Talon saw Vader and you drive away in the police car? It would have to be heartbreaking, and that's why I go to such extent with the different kennels and the different parts of my yard, just to make sure it doesn't happen. So, you know, it may be silly to a certain point that, you know, I'm putting, you know, human emotions on an animal that may not feel it, but I don't want him to see Vader in equipment that he would recognize and me in a uniform that he would recognize leaving in what at one time was his car. And in terms of keeping them kind of separate, I mean, it's like you're living this,

these two lives, like you're cheating on Talon with Vader. Yes, funny you should say that, because there has been different times that it has happened where I've slipped up and one's potentially seen me with the other one. It's that very feeling like you just described. It's almost like, oops, I got caught, you know, kind of thing. But honestly, I think it's worth it. They put so much into protecting me, serving the community. And I just really feel that I owe it to them to try to do everything I can, and especially Talon, to, you know, let him hold on to that dignity that he had for so long. Scott just put his house on the market. He says he doesn't think his place has enough room for all the dogs, which seems a little wild, because it actually looks like a dog paradise.

But Scott says until maybe one day, when Talon and Vader can be together, he wants to make sure they both have enough room, so neither one feels like they're getting the bum deal. If you'd like to see a video of me wearing that nutty padded suit and being attacked by a police dog, go to our website, thisiscriminal.com. Criminal is produced by Lauren Spohr and me, audio engineering help from Rob Byers. Special thanks to everyone at the Hillsborough Police Department

and Alamance County Sheriff's Office. Julianne Alexander makes our illustrations. You can see them on our website and our new Instagram, criminal underscore podcast. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC. And we're a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collective of the 13 best podcasts around, shows like Love and Radio. On their latest, Timothy Wiley died and then his story began.

In the remote high deserts of New Mexico, a door opens to the world beyond and the world within. For instance, a schizophrenic, as long as he can handle it, as long as he can get on with life, it doesn't matter, does it? I mean, he's just got a different perception. You can call it schizophrenia if you want, but the fact that you might hear voices,

I hear voices, I hear voices, I mean, half my life I've heard voices. They give me good advice. Go listen. Radiotopia from PRX is supported by the Knight Foundation and MailChimp, celebrating creativity, chaos, and teamwork.

I'm Phoebe Dredge. This is Criminal. Radiotopia. From PRX. Support for this show is brought to you by Nissan Kicks. It's never too late to try new things. And it's never too late to reinvent yourself. The all new reimagined Nissan Kicks is the city-sized crossover vehicle that's been completely revamped for urban adventure. From the design and styling to the performance, all the way to features like the Bose Personal Plus sound system, you can get closer to everything you love about city life in the

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