Most of the areas of Sacramento County are highly populated urban settings with homes, businesses, parks and schools.  It was in the past that the canines would be deployed on an area search to look for fleeing suspects or missing people, but today canine handlers also track suspects and missing people. 

Tracking is simply placing the canine in a tracking harness on a 15 foot leash and having the canine follow a ground disturbance made by the person as they fled from an area.  Tracking can be used over grass, dirt or hard surfaces such as cement and asphalt.  As the person who is being tracked walks they leave a trail.  The trail is a disturbance to the ground. The weight of the person crushes the vegetation and as the biological matter decomposes it has a different odor than the ground around it that the canine can detect.

The canine’s sense of smell is said to be 100,000 to 1,000,000 times more sensitive than a humans. The person leaving the track also deposits skin rafts along the track as well as the odor of the shoes they are wearing.  It is all of these odors put together that the canine uses to follow the track even through contamination of foot traffic belonging to someone else who is not the focus of the track. Ideally handlers like to start a track of a person within 30 to 45 minutes of the track being set.

This is the optimal time for a successful outcome.  Wind is really the only adversary of a tracking canine.  In heavy wind gusts the odor is blown away from the tracks origin and is difficult to follow, but never under estimate a motivated handler and his/her canine.  If there’s a will there’s a way.

Handlers will attempt to track from scenes of robberies that have just occurred.  The track will assist officers in establishing a direction of travel and if the track stops abruptly in a parking lot that information would assist investigating officers in determining where the suspect(s) may have had a vehicle parked. 

Tracking becomes an essential tool on deployments in the rural parts of Sacramento County. Tracking can assist in narrowing the scope of a search in a vast search area.  Handlers have had numerous successes with the deployment of the canine on a track.