Four-legged Special Agent Joey Fights Cyber Crime against Kids
Joey is a yellow lab who has been specially trained to help New Mexico law enforcement find electronic devices which harbor child pornography or other sexually explicit materials. Joey and his owner Owen Pena work for New Mexico’s Internet Crimes against Children Unit. This cybercrimes unit locates, tracks and captures sexual predators and child pornographers.
So how does the system work? After they get a search warrant to look at specific places, law enforcement will first do a human search for evidence of child pornography or other sexual crimes which are stored on electronic devices. After the human search of the premises, a dog like Joey will do his own follow-up search. Thanks to the dog’s incredible sense of smell, Joey can find evidence that humans have missed. What the dog is smelling is a substance called TPPO which is found on the circuit boards of all electronic devices. Joey is the only electronic-sniffing dog in New Mexico.
