For Additional Headlines - go to our News Section »

• Attorney General Investigating Panama City Oil Operations Contractors
  made by oneredkitty
• Locals Sound off on AZ Immigration Battle
  made by Scavenger
• Attorney General Investigating Panama City Oil Operations Contractors
  made by COWGIRL
• New Millage Plan Passes With School Board
  made by Dewey712
• Attorney General Investigating Panama City Oil Operations Contractors
  made by oneredkitty

Cell Phone Sniffing Dog
10/07/08 - 03:06 PM

Associated Press

 RSS Feed

Her name is Razor and she has a nose for Nokias.

Department of Corrections officials are counting on Razor the dog to help sniff out contraband cell phones in Florida prisons.

She is the first dog trained to find contraband cell phones in Florida’s prisons.

The 14-month-old Malinois is still in training. When she joins the corrections department in mid to late November, Razor will help enforce a new law making cell phones in prisons illegal. The law went into effect October 1st.

Previously, inmates who were caught with phones could lose privileges or lose time off their sentence they’d earned for good behavior.

Under the new law, if an inmate gets caught with a phone they face up to five additional years in prison and a fine of $5,000. Officials say inmates have used cell phones to coordinate escape attempts, harass victims and arrange drug deals in and outside of prison. In the past year, officials found approximately 340 cell phones in Florida prisons.

To fight the problem, officials have tried jamming cell phone signals but that can create problems for users of legitimate cell phones in the area. Drug sweeps have also turned up phones because both are often hidden in crafty places, like the soles of shower shoes, in tape players, in soda cans and inside the layers of rolls of toilet paper. That’s where Razor comes in.

Razor’s name is a riff on the name of the popular Motorola cell phone, the RAZR, but she isn’t the only state with a cell-phone dog detective. Virginia uses cell-phone sniffing dogs, and Maryland began using cell-phone sniffing dogs this summer. Maryland’s three dogs have since found 23 cell phones, said Maryland prison spokesman Mark Vernarelli. But the dogs also have a deterrent effect.

Razor still has another six weeks left of an eight-week training.
   
(Copyright 2008 by The Associated Press.  All Rights Reserved.)