K-9 team joins Metro Transit Police

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A nose for trouble

He’s a one-and-a-half year old with an extraordinary nose for trouble. Stevie is a Black Lab, and a bomb-sniffing dog assigned to Metro Transit Police Deputy Tim Morgan.

Stevie and his counterpart Jones, a two-year-old Chocolate Lab are King County’s newest experts when it comes to sniffing out potentially-hazardous items.

Stevie’s trained to search for and smell out this explosive odor, and how he’s conversing with me when he finds it is, he sits down and looks at me and what he’s saying is ‘I’ve done my job, I found the odor, now you do your job and give me some food,' and that’s how it works, and then I give him about 3-4 kibbles of food, every time that he finds something and sits down.

In fact, there are more than 19,000 different explosive odors and Stevie is trained to detect all of them, after his 10 weeks of training at the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms, which he completed in December.

Those odors go beyond explosives alone and include guns, ammunition, and shell casings. Stevie’s the first full-time bomb-sniffing dog ever assigned to King County Metro Transit, thanks to two federal grants, one from the Department of Homeland Security.

Metro’s General Manager Kevin Desmond says the canine’s capabilities can be used far beyond the department itself.

Not only for us, but I think having Stevie around also helps the county in general, so when there are other needs outside of just the transit system, Stevie can be made available by the sheriff for other county needs as well.

Deputy Morgan has been with the King County Sheriff’s office for 21 years, and Stevie is the first canine companion he’s had in that time. He takes care of the Black Lab when they’re not at work together.

Jones also lives with his handler, Deputy John Decker. Both dogs are trained on what’s called the ‘food reward system’, which is just what it sounds like.

The dogs search out training materials about 30 times a day, and get a few bites of food in return. Deputy Morgan says Stevie certainly works hard, but that it’s a labor of love for this Labrador.

We do sweeps and searches of Metro facilities, the Metro coaches, and when the tunnel reopens in September, we’ll be assigned to there a lot, we’ll be working the tunnel areas a lot. It’s a big game for him, he loves it, he’s very energetic when he’s working, and when he’s not working he’s just laying around like a regular dog.