By Briana Vannozzi
Correspondent
“Previously scouted a couple of places that need to be checked. The Marion area. High drug activity,” said Camden County Police Department Sergeant Zsakhiem James.
We head out to Camden’s waterfront south neighborhood. A patrol officer in the car ahead, a sergeant in one behind. Sergeant James and K-9 officer Zero, in the back.
Zero is an 11-year old Czech shepherd and holds the record for the most criminal apprehensions in the state — 67 total.
“They take buildings like this and try to stash the drugs inside them and as you look in there it’s just so much stuff that we’d have to hand search that whole building. But with my dog, I can just run him around the room let him sniff and he’ll be able to point right directly to the stash,” James explained.
It’s situations like this where the K-9 help is critical.
“That gets us in and out of that building a lot faster because as you see it’s totally dilapidated, it’s very dangerous,” he said.
But after surveying the inside, it’s decided that it’s too dangerous for everyone involved — including this reporter.
“So they’ve been shooting up. That’s their makeshift table,” James said.
So we set off to another location where Zero can get to work.
“I have a trained police dog! If you do not surrender he will find you and bite you! Go find them,” James said.
The six dogs in the unit are trained in bomb detection or narcotics.
“Right now I just told him to look for drugs,” James said. “So that’s just the command we use. Some people ‘find the candy’ or ‘find the drugs,’ whatever you wanna use.”
The dogs will bark and scratch in a spot, indicating to the officer that drugs may be within a 12-foot radius.
“So they probably had drugs in this closet and because it was closed it’s trapped the scent, the odor is trapped in here, we got some boxes in here shoe boxes,” he said.
“A human being has 5 million cells dedicated to the sense of smell. A dog has 220 to 225 million cells dedicated to the sense of smell,” James said. “There hasn’t been a thing invented yet that can smell as well as a dog.”
No finds today, but Zero’s detection means the drug use was recent. And the officers will be back.
“All these little plastic bags with tie offs had drugs in them,” James said.
“The fact that a K-9 shows up dramatically increases the chance of surrender, unless, the likelihood of a physical confrontation where an officer may get hurt. Since we’ve had additional K-9s, the number of officer injuries has gone down,” he said.
The city has had nine homicides since January, down from the same period last year when there were 16. But even as the community policing efforts are being touted and showing success, the city is still plagued with problems.
“We’re here to help. We wanna make the neighborhood safer. We wanna make it back like it was,” James said.
And he feels hopeful that expanding the K-9 unit may do that.