Marquette police officers receive certification in Alpena

MARQUETTE — Officers from the Marquette Police Department received certification at the annual National Training Seminar in Alpena.

Over 300 teams were in attendance from all over the state of Michigan, Ohio and Canada.

The certification is training to certify the handlers with the dogs.

It helps the handlers get in tune with the dog to a level they can go out and accurately detect substances, missing people or explosives they are looking for.

The dog is a tool they can use that has better senses than humans.

“You can send a dog in there who is looking for the different odor being human scent. We cant detect that, we would use a dog in order to find say someone was in there where they would be hiding. It cuts down the time, and possibly injuring other officers,” said Todd Collins, K-9 Handler.

“They can find that stuff a lot quicker than we could if we had to manually search things. Especially things like explosives, obviously we don’t want to be digging through material, digging through boxes or disrupting a device that maybe be placed somewhere,” said John Waldo, K-9 Handler.

The certificate helps show that the officers are up to speed and are growing to be better for the safety of the community.

They also want the community to know that they might be working dogs, but they are friendly dogs as well.