Officer Peppermint couldn’t get more than a few steps down the hallway of Clark High School Thursday morning before he was apprehended.

“Can I pet him?” Jessie Granados, a high school senior, asked Clark County School District Police Officer Steven Patty.

“Oh, absolutely,” Patty said, offering his four-legged partner. “Yes, please.”

Granados and her friend Leila Williams bent over to play with the dog and took pictures with her.

Peppermint, a 3-year-old American Labrador, is one of six dogs in the Clark County School District Police Department’s K-9 unit. Unlike the more aggressive K-9s in the Metropolitan Police Department that are trained to apprehend suspects, CCSD’s K-9s are meant to be friendly and approachable. Police say they are proactive and preventative, helping school police build positive relationships with students.

“They are our most popular officers,” CCSD Police Lt. Bryan Zink told the Las Vegas Review-Journal.

Peppermint is one of four dogs that only detect guns by smelling burnt ammunition. The other two can sniff out drugs, but they don’t warn about marijuana, since it’s legal in Nevada, Patty said.

All a day’s work

Each day, a computer generates three random high schools and four random classrooms for the K-9s to visit. Students are instructed to come out of their classrooms and take all important electronics with them while the K-9 sniffs around. Those locations are then removed from the list after they have been searched.

Shalee Okelberry, Clark’s deputy warden, said she appreciates that in addition to frisking, the K-9s also stop by to say hello.

“What I love about the K-9 unit is that they build positive relationships with students. Sometimes there can be a negative perspective on law enforcement in general, but they can overcome that very easily through the interaction with their pups,” she said.

On Thursday morning, Patty brought Peppermint into an Advancement Via Individual Determination (AVID) classroom, where juniors raised their hands to receive stickers with Peppermint’s face on them. Peppermint rolled around on the carpet, scratching himself. Most of the students had never met Peppermint, but they raved about Officer Oreo, who seemed to be a crowd favorite and had more than 8,000 Instagram followers.

Patty taught the students how Peppermint works: she sniffs for gunpowder and sits very still when she finds something. When asked if the dogs could detect it on people’s hands, Patty said they are working on the smell of cell phones.

“I like it, but it’s also a little scary,” junior Griselda Castillo told the Review-Journal about seeing dogs at her school. “Because they’re big.”

When asked if they generally feel safe at school, Castillo and the two friends at her table unanimously responded, “No.”

“You come in and you never know because there’s always a school shooting,” Jordyn Cantley said. “So I feel like every day you come to school, you pray that you’re going to make it. You never know.”

She said she was scared when she heard some freshmen talking a few weeks ago about how easy it would be to carry a knife to school instead of a gun.

To feel safer, the Clark juniors said they would like more full-featured, airport-style detectors. CCSD implemented such technology at major sports events this year. The girls also said monthly searches would be helpful.

In addition to searching schools, the K-9s are also called up for active duty.

For example, Patty and Peppermint had gone to the Cowan Academic Center early Thursday morning to investigate a gun stolen from a student’s uncle in Henderson the night before. Patty and Peppermint walked through the entire school and waited for the suspect student’s bus, which they also walked. They found no gun.

Peppermint’s colleague, Officer Jack, an English Springer/Cocker Spaniel mix, recently had success when he was called to a hospital where a man had fired a gun. He found the man’s gun outside the area that police had initially marked.

Patty said that by sniffing in the open air, the K-9s can do the same job as about 30 officers.

Proactive approach

Okelberry said she likes that the K-9s take a proactive approach, which she said helps students “be more resilient to those naughty things on campus.”

When Patty told her that schools are taken off the list after they’ve been searched enough, she said, “I don’t want to be off the list. I want them to keep coming.”

She, like most people, had a favorite: Officer Oreo. Luckily for her, her daughter is known as Oreo’s favorite human.

“These are dogs that are trained to interact positively,” Zink said. “It makes us so much more approachable.”

Peppermint wasn’t the only dog ​​at Clark High School that day. She got to exchange a few kisses with Bowie, a diabetes alert dog who is a service dog for teacher Susan Schiller.

Her job may be hard work, but rest assured, Peppermint’s job is the highlight of her day. After all, it’s Patty’s job to make sure things aren’t boring at home. Otherwise, she won’t have the motivation to go to work.

Contact Katie Futterman at [email protected].