Aaron Lewis
6 years
Originally from here
I work in the special investigations unit. I’m a special investigator. We investigate drug related crimes, prostitution and gambling. I always had an aptitude when I was in patrol on investigating drug related crimes. I was always good at it so I fell into that role naturally.

I’m on the swat team also. I know that the 100 club has funded several of our purchases for specialized equipment that we use there. They’ve also funded the purchase of multiple k9s for us.
It’s things that, they make us more effective, and it’ things we wouldn’t be able to get otherwise. 

For Daisy, both of our previous K9s retired. One retired in 2019 and one retired in 2020. We had no K9s on the Texas side. With Covid and the cyber attack and everything happened, it was really hard to come up with funds around that time. So the 100 club gave us the funds to purchase daisy for the use of drug investigations. 

She lives with me, he lives at my house, she comes to work with me every day, she’s around my family. My car is a specialized car for the k9. It has a cage built into the back to house her, a safe space. It’s got dual climate controls. Sensors so if car gets too hot it notifies me, and bailout for emergencies.

Plays with 1 1/2 year old, gets along with other dogs.

I’m a professional canine decoy, so I travel around east Texas and train with a lot of k9 teams with patrol apprehension bite dogs. With TTPD, all of our handlers, the dogs always lived with the handler.

It paid for the actual purchase of her and then my training with her as a handler and then my national certification. We’re a certified k9 team in narcotics. 

When I deploy her, she’s trained to alert on marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine, MDMA and heroin. So the Supreme Court classifies k9s as a super sensitive instrument. So she’s able to detect very minute amounts of those drugs in a large area. One of the ways we use her is parcel introduction. So we’ll go to these mailing facilities and run he Ron packages. So she’s able to detect narcotics that have been concealed as contraband inside these packages. A lot of times they’re vacuum sealed, shrink wrapped and head sealed and she can detect them inside of that. 

We also deploy her roadside for vehicle sniffs. 

She’s only been trained on the the actual real narcotic.

Having her, we’re able to detect where large amounts of narcotics would be that are coming into the community and we’re able to intercept this before they get into the area. We’re able to get large quantiies at a time before they get parceled out. We’ve had a lot of success with her in doing. Keeps everybody safer and keeps the bad stuff off the streets. 

Organizations like the 100 club helping fund departments, or helping departments acquire equipment they would otherwise not have gotten is very important. Aside from the k9, they’re able to fund large projects that affect the entire department as a whole from our swat team to our patrol guys to our specialized units. Grants for fallen officers families. 

She is a single purpose dog. In the last decade, the k9s we’ve had have been dual purpose, bite dogs and narcotic detecting dog. She is strictly narcotic detecting but she’s not trained to bite anyone. And she’s a lab. 

The true patrol jobs like bite dogs are malinois or German spends typically. Indraction and lot use labs. A lot of the federal government are going strictly to labs. Veteran affairs only use labs.