FAIRFIELD COUNTY, S.C. — On Tuesday, the Fairfield County Sheriff’s Office introduced a new unit and new deputies with four legs and fur.
“It’s important to have dogs. Before, we either had to go to SLED or Richland County, and other agencies, but to have a dog here, it just helps speed up the process of getting a dog out on scene,” Fairfield County Sheriff Will Montgomery explained.
Montgomery says the Sheriff’s Office has not had a proper K-9 unit since 2019, which can cost the department both time and money.
“It saves the county money, and this has mostly been funded by our new sheriff’s foundation so that has helped us a lot also," Montgomery stated.
K-9 handler Deputy Andrew Ellison says adding K-9s Gaia and Danno to their team means they can help solve a wider variety of cases.
“We can go from getting minor amounts of narcotics off traffic stops to finding guns that were thrown that can help solve murders… sky is the limit… I don’t think that there’s any crime that we can’t help solve with a K-9 if something is missing,” Ellison said.
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Deputy Allen Cox, who helped start the new K-9 unit, says these dogs can do double what one working person can accomplish in a year.
“They do a job that we cannot do. We cannot locate with the same level of precision that they can. It is a documented fact that one dog can save a department 5,000 man-hours per year searching for things. A lot of our job is searching for things, discarded items, or thrown evidence so this saves us a lot of time," Cox explained.
The K-9s have already been out on patrol and have also been nationally certified.