New Breed Of Crime Fighter Joins Pasco Sheriff To Fight Child Porn

PASCO COUNTY, FL — Boomer's not the first law enforcement K-9 with the unusual ability to use his keen sense of smell to detect USBs, memory cards and computer hard drives that child sex abusers want to keep concealed.

But he's the first electronic storage device detection K-9 in Tampa Bay.

The 3-year-old blonde English Lab, born in Indiana, was donated to the Pasco County Sheriff's Office by Anaheim, California-based Operation Underground Railroad, a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting children from sex trafficking and exploitation.

Operation Underground Railroad has placed 38 electronic detection K-9s with law enforcement agencies in 21 states.

The dogs are specially trained by Jordan Connection K9 of McCordsville, Indiana, to sniff out devices as small as a half-inch memory card hidden beneath a chair cushion or dresser drawer.

Boomer hit the ground running in his first week on the job in August. The sheriff's office was tipped off that a New Port Richey man was in possession of child pornography. Accompanying deputies to the man's home, Boomer's keen sense of smell detected several electronic storage devices that deputies missed, leading to the arrest of a 23-year-old man arrest on charges of possessing 10 or more child porn images.

Todd Jordan, the owner, program developer and chief trainer at Jordan Detection K9, a company he founded in 2015, has trained Boomer and more than 70 other electronic detection K-9s to assist federal, state and local investigators in cases ranging including child exploitation, counter-terrorism, white collar crimes, homicides, insider threats and drug cases.

A career firefighter, Jordan began his career in 1997 training accelerant detection dogs for the national insurance provider State Farm. He adapted the methods used to train dogs to detect accelerants to the more difficult task of sniffing out the tell-tale odor of electronic components.

"There's a chemical compound that's within the manufacturing process of the device, and the dogs are trained to indicate on that chemical," Jordan said.

The dogs will sit when they come upon the odor, then, when instructed to show, they can point to the location of the device with their noses.

Electronic storage detection dogs are a new weapon in the fight against child sex crimes, Jordan said. In the digital age, predators often watch child pornography on removable electronic storage devices to avoid detection.

"A micro-SD can hold a terabyte of information, which could be hundreds of thousands of images," Jordan said. "Even the smallest of these devices can hold up to a thousand hours of video, which can be critical evidence to bring these criminals to justice. But thumb drives and micro-SD cards are virtually impossible to find in a hand search."

The company made national headlines when one of the dogs it trained, Bear, detected key evidence in the home of former Subway pitchman Jared Fogle. Fogle is now serving 15 years in prison for possession of child pornography.

Bear also discovered evidence at the home and gymnasium of U.S. gymnastics coach Marvin Sharp. Sharp killed himself in jail in 2015 after his arrest on charges of child molestation.

Jordan exclusively uses rescued Labradors retrievers for electronic detection because he said they're a friendly, eager breed that seems to have a knack for sniffing out electronic components. Their good nature is also an asset in the field around people, especially children, Jordan said.

For that reason, Boomer does double duty as a certified therapy dog, the Pasco sheriff's sixth therapy dog that calms and comforts victims of violent crime.