Dogs and trainers work through a training exercise Wednesday at Hope Center Indy. A class of dogs who came for training graduated Friday before heading to their new jobs with law enforcement agencies. With a “K9 barn” being finished on the Hope Center campus, the plan is to raise and train future K9s there for sniffing out evidence in human trafficking and child exploitation cases.
Tom Russo | Daily Reporter
INDIANAPOLIS — Tail wagging, the black Lab walks slowly past a chest of drawers, a cardboard box of decorations and an upholstered chair.
Coming to the freestanding lamp, the dog sits. She’s sniffed out what’s hidden in the lamp base.
A new building on the campus of Hope Center Indy will become a site for raising dogs who’ll be trained to sniff out electronic evidence in human trafficking and child exploitation cases.
The ministry at 11850 Brookville Road, just west of New Palestine and the Marion-Hancock county line, serves women exiting human trafficking, as well as some recovering from abuse or addiction. The residential facility, housed in the former Marion County Home, offers women a safe place to receive counseling, gain more education, and build skills to help them transition into a brighter future. It’s funded by donations and grants, as well as various enterprises on the campus — including a boutique, a salon, a wedding barn and a greenhouse — that also offer opportunities for women to obtain work experience.
Sara Feasel, the center’s director of development, said while it works on the treatment facet of addressing human trafficking, other organizations work toward rescues and prosecutions. Operation Underground Railroad is one such group. It funded construction of the “K9 barn” east of the main Hope Center buildings.
Crews have been painting rooms in the building this week. Soon it will be a place where Todd Jordan can house and train Labradors to sniff out electronic storage devices, which often contain evidence in trafficking and exploitation cases but are often hidden when law enforcement arrives.
“They’ll hide it in really tricky places,” Feasel said. “(The dogs) are able to find a lot of the evidence.”
The first Hope Center dog, Layla, was raised for the past year by a Hope Center graduate before spending two weeks training with her new handler. Friday, Layla and a group of other dogs graduated before heading to their new jobs. Layla will work for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.
Jordan, an Anderson firefighter and former Vernon Township Fire Department chief, said he had trained dogs to be arson K9s. Such dogs find “accelerants,” or flammable substances such as kerosene or gasoline that could have been used to quickly make a large fire. But in his friendships with other police officers and firefighters, they talked about other tasks dogs could be trained to do. A friend was on a task force focused on Internet crimes against children and spoke of hard-to-find evidence; Jordan said perhaps a dog could be trained to sniff that out.
One of Jordan’s early electronic storage detection K9s helped find evidence in the case of former Subway spokesman Jared Fogle. The same dog later found evidence in the case involving former gymnastics coach Marvin Sharp. When those cases came to light, “Everyone took notice of what the dogs were doing,” said Jordan, now owner, program developer and chief trainer of Jordan Detection K9.
For a couple of years, Jordan has brought dogs to the 25-acre Hope Center campus to train them. He anticipates training 40 dogs this year and said having the building at the center is a big asset, “a one-stop shop.”
Having dogs on campus in the future, including puppies to raise, is also hoped to be a therapeutic presence for the center’s residents. Their arrival also will offer additional opportunities to gain resumé-building experience for women who’d like to work as vet techs or groomers, Feasel said.
“This also offers a ton of opportunities for our residents,” she said.
