Elite K9 teams set to help keep Super Bowl safe

By Nick Starling

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    SAN ANTONIO, Texas (KTVT) — SoFi Stadium is the largest Super Bowl stadium the NFL has ever had to decorate, and to protect it, security will be tight in the air, on the ground and in the water.

But there will be unseen threats that only elite canine teams can sniff out.

At the TSA Canine Training Center on Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, it’s the only place the Transportation Security Administration trains dogs that are sent out throughout the country.

It trains canines from all over the country to protect airports, mass transit systems and sporting venues.

“Ours are single purpose detection only for explosives in our particular program,” said Danny Diller, Supervisory Training Instructor at the TSA Canine Training Center.

At the training center, the elite canines sniff around cardboard boxes, seeking explosives and when they spot something, they let their handlers know by sitting down and looking at them with their tail wagging.

“Training canines is a specialty sport,” added Diller.

“When we go out and do our evaluations and we train the students here and train the dogs, we take it very seriously because that could be someone’s life in our hands,” said Canine Trainer Nicholas Graham.

About 130 students train at the facility a year and they come from all over the country.

The elite teams train at the center for 11 to 16 weeks depending on their specialty.

“We can take these dogs and we can deploy them to different locations around the world to support national security events, large sporting events such as the super bowl and the handlers and the teams have all got the commonality of the search technique and how we’re going to approach searches so that we are mutually supporting when we get into these larger venues,” said Diller.

Another part of the training entails a fake airport terminal with real people inside acting as if they are walking around or sitting at the terminal and the canines have to sniff each person out to smell if there are any explosive materials.

“We actually have a contract with role player contracts that we really do mimic the exact environment that they’re deployed to across the nation,” said Diller.

Teams at the training center have been deployed to several Super Bowls including Super Bowl LV in Tampa.

Closer to home, canines conducted sweeps at AT&T Stadium before major public events.

“Across the nation we have multiple points of contact that we work with and it’s really developed into that larger security plan on how we’re going to integrate these teams and how many teams we’re going to need and a lot of that is driven by pure mission,” added Diller.

For these canine teams, their next mission could be at SoFi stadium.

Diller said the accuracy rate for the canines is over 90% in order to be certified and as threats to our safety continue to change, he stresses the canines can adapt to learn what to detect quickly only taking two to three days.

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