When it comes to finding items that criminals try to hide, Ottawa police have a secret weapon: Piper, the Electronic Storage Detection (ESD) K9. The two-and-a-half-year-old black Labrador retriever has been trained to detect the scent of a chemical found in devices like USB sticks, SD cards, cell phones, AirTags and hard drives. “It’s triphenylphosphine oxide, TPPO for short,” explained Det. Dominic Paykarimah, Piper’s handler with the police service’s Internet Child Exploitation (ICE) Unit. “These devices, when they’re manufactured, this chemical is used to prevent them from overheating. So that is the chemical that she is able to smell and that’s how she’s detecting these devices.” Piper has been part of the unit since November and has so far accompanied officers seven times while they were executing search warrants. “A lot of these people hide these devices from us, but also from their family members. So, when we go in there to attempt to find these devices, [it] makes it problematic when they try to conceal it. So, Piper comes with us through these search warrants, she searches the rooms with us, and she detects on the hidden devices,” Paykarimah said. “Pretty much on every single one of them she’s indicated on something that an investigator has missed so she has been very valuable to us.” Piper is also a trained therapy dog. “You can imagine the things that we come across, but also for any victims that we are dealing with as well, it comforts them,” Paykarimah said. “We just had an incident a month ago where some child came in and she said if it wasn’t for Piper, she wouldn’t have spoken out so she’s definitely doing her job and she’s doing it great.” You can follow Piper when she’s on and off duty on Instagram.
