Campus Safety July/August 2021 - 28

FEATURE // Mental Health
Comfort K9s Make a Huge Impact
for University of Illinois Police
Meet Lollipop, one of U of I's
comfort K9s. Photo courtesy U of I.
The K9s' job is to comfort and provide animal therapy in times of great stress or anxiety.
They have already made a big impact at U of I and in the greater Champaign-Urbana area.
By Patrick Wade
F
OUR NEW POLICE K9 UNITS
made their debut on the
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
(U of I) campus recently
- but maybe not in the way that most
would expect.
Instead of detecting narcotics,
sniffing for explosives or tracking
suspects, these police dogs will be
taking a much more cuddly approach.
Their job is to comfort and
provide animal therapy in times of
great stress or anxiety. And they have
already made a great impact in the
U of I community and the greater
Champaign-Urbana area.
28
Police Chief Used Comfort K9s at
Her Previous University
U of I Executive Director of Public
Safety and Chief of Police Alice Cary's
deployment of therapy K9s dates back
to her previous job as police chief at
the University of Maryland Baltimore
(UMB), where she first learned about
how departments were just starting to
incorporate comfort K9s into their operations.
She read a magazine article
about a program that was underway at
the Greenfield, Massachusetts, police
department with two Saint Bernards
named Donut and Clarence. K9
Clarence had responded to Newtown,
CAMPUS SAFETY JULY/AUGUST 2021
Massachusetts, and Las Vegas after
the mass shootings in each city.
After visiting with K9 Officer Donut
in 2019, Chief Cary was sold on the
program. Shortly thereafter, UMB got
its first comfort K9, Lexi, a pit bull mix.
At the time, the UMB Police Department
was only the third university
department in the country to deploy
therapy K9s.
" It really went beyond my wildest
dreams to see what a dog could do and
just bringing people out of their shells,
whether they are having a bad day
or just bringing a smile to someone's
face, " Cary said. " What Lexi did, people
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