ATF’s gun sniffing dog now working with Albuquerque police
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (KRQE) – Meet Freya, she is the newest member of the Albuquerque Police Department. But she’s not like other K9s, Freya, owned by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, is APD’s first specialized gun-sniffing dog.
“She’s on call 24/7, we will send the K9 out to help locate spent shell casings and firearms and other explosive-type items,” explained Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms Special Agent Brendan Iber.
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Trained by the ATF, she can sniff out guns, and shell casings and detect up to 19,000 different compilations of explosive residue. There are only 45 of these specialized K9s in the country, and Freya is one of them.
“When I reached out to Chief Medina and said, hey I have an opportunity to bring this K9 in, would your department be willing to use her, he said absolutely, there was no questions asked,” Iber said.
All of this is to help combat violent crime. “When the opportunity to bring a dog into the city to help us find firearms, shell casings, presented itself, we were more than happy to once again partner with one of the best partners we could hope for,” Albuquerque Police Chief Harold Medina said.
Medina says while the department has used its other K9s in the past to search for guns, this one has more targeted training and is more comfortable working around crowds of people. He says over the last few months, Freya has already been deployed to find shell casings in an officer-involved shooting and other cases.
Freya is just another way the ATF is helping Albuquerque police fight crime. The feds brought in NIBIN last year, a machine that creates detailed images of shell casings which the ATF compares to other casings collected at different scenes.
Between NIBIN technology and Freya’s nose, APD says help from the feds is making its cases much stronger. “This partnership has proven to be so successful in several cases over the years whether it was the homicides in the Muslim community,” Medina said.
