The newest member of the Douglas County Sheriff’s Office has a nose for narcotics.

Gero, the county’s new crime-fighting German shepherd, began his patrol work less than two weeks ago alongside handler Cpl. Ed Swanson. The dog is trained to chase fleeing suspects, protect Swanson and search buildings for hidden suspects.

But Gero’s main duty is alerting police to illegal drugs using a nose that’s thousands of times more powerful than a human’s.

Gero’s nose is always “on,” Swanson said. The dog indicates the presence of drugs– cocaine, marijuana, heroin, methamphetamine, ecstasy and oxycontin — by biting and scratching.

“The smaller the quantity, the easier it is for them to pinpoint,” Swanson said.

A sniff, not a “search”

The U.S. Supreme Court held in 1983, in United States v. Place, that a sniff by a specially trained narcotics-detection dog wasn’t a “search” under the definition of the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure.

In the court’s view, as long as a driver isn’t detained unreasonably by the side of the road while waiting for the drug sniff, the presence of Gero at the side panels isn’t an extra intrusion.

For example, it would be legal to post Gero at a DUI sobriety checkpoint — a type of suspicion-free traffic stop upheld by the Supreme Court –and send the dog quickly around cars that already had been stopped as part of the checkpoint.

“We may well use the dog at a DUI check lane,” Sheriff Rick Trapp said.

Douglas County Deputy Doug Woods, left, helps Cpl. Ed Swanson and the Douglas County Sheriff's Office's new drug dog, Gero, go through some maneuvers in South Park, 1200 Mass. Gero joined the Sheriff's Office fewer than two weeks ago and has been trained to alert law enforcement when illegal drugs are present, among other duties.

Courts also have upheld the use of a dog to sniff lockers in public schools. Trapp said he was still weighing whether, upon request, he’d want Gero to do that.

Swanson and Trapp both said the canine unit wouldn’t be called to an ordinary traffic stop unless officers could articulate something that made them suspect there were drugs in the car.

“If Corporal Swanson is off-duty, it’s going to have to be a significant investigation to bring him in . . . It’s an investigative technique that we don’t want to abuse and overuse,” Trapp said.

Legal challenges

Swanson said it was important to train Gero weekly so that his sniffs would stand up to defense attorneys’ challenges in court.

“There’s always a defense on a dog sniff that that particular dog didn’t have the required training and ability– that it will alert to anything or too much,” said John Frydman, a Lawrence defense attorney.

Frydman said he disagreed with the use of the dog to sniff drugs for a simple reason: He thinks illegal drugs should be legal.

“Personally, I think that the dog is helpful to society to ferret out explosives and bombs, but when you use it to find small amounts of drugs on otherwise legal people, I think it’s a misuse of our dollars,” he said.

Gero is not trained to smell for explosives.

Loyal partner

In his first week on the job, the dog smelled for drugs at two traffic stops and helped the Lawrence Police Department during the execution of a drug-related search warrant, Swanson said.

The 3-year-old, 75-pound, full-blooded shepherd has lived with Swanson and his family since completing a certification program earlier this spring in Elkhart, Ind.

Together, Swanson and Gero cruise the county in a new Dodge Intrepid equipped with a computerized system that monitors the temperature inside the car– what Swanson informally calls a “hot dog” system.

“You couldn’t ask for a better partner,” said Swanson, a former Douglas County Jail supervisor who worked for three years as a dog handler at the Salina Police Department.

The county hasn’t had its own canine unit since April 2002, when Baloo, a German shepherd, went into retirement. Gero cost roughly $12,000 to buy and train, not including costs for the new patrol car.

All of the money to purchase and train Gero came from private donors, including a $10,000 gift from the Lawrence-based Kriz Charitable Fund Inc.