Halton Regional Police Service welcomes K9 Cache to the family

Police in the Halton Region are turning to a four-legged friend with a sensitive nose for help in fighting some very serious modern crime.

The Halton Regional Police Service has announced their newest team member, an Electronic Storage Detection (ESD) dog named K9 Cache.

This dog is an easy-going two-year-old Labrador with a good nose and already – after a few months on the job – a proven record of fighting crime.

“She’s going to be a game changer for us,” says Halton police Deputy Chief Jeff Hill.

Cache is trained to sniff out electronic storage devices like SD cards, hard drives, cellphones and other devices that store digital images.

“She’s already found 60 different devices. Even yesterday morning she was already used in a warrant where she found different things that we would have missed,” says Hill.

With her sensitive nose, Cache can pick out the smell of a chemical manufacturers use to keep devices from overheating.

“Certain USB sticks are only the size of your thumb and some of these offenders will go to great lengths to hide them … So when our members go through a house that might be filled with stuff, they are going to miss it. Well, when Cache goes through, Cache can smell it. Cache can find it,” says Hill.

“She’s fantastic. She’s a very smart dog. It’s incredible to see how thorough she is when she searches. The things that she’s found that we wouldn’t have found,” says Cache’s Handler Stephane Verreault.

The electronic device sniffing dogs are trained and provided at no cost by an American non-profit organization focused on fighting child sexual abuse and exploitation.

Police say she is one of 10 ESD K9s in Canada, along with Blue in Toronto and Willow in Winnipeg.

“Imagine trying to find something as small as a fingernail, a memory card, in a 1,400-square-foot home where no area is out of place. She’s able to show us where we should be looking and indicate exactly where to do our search,” says Sgt. Karrie Web from Winnipeg police’s Internet Child Exploitation Unit.

The dogs are part of the police response to the changing technology behind child exploitation.

Cache went through a challenging five month training program before being donated to the HRPS by Our Rescue – a non-profit organization that combats child sexual exploitation and human trafficking worldwide.

Her background sets her up for her new role assisting authorities with sexual exploitation and human trafficking investigations. As a secondary role, Cache will also offer comfort and wellness support to victims of crime, their families and officers.

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