Labrador Retriever ‘Queue’ Wins Uniformed Service K-9 Award for Canine Excellence By Melanie Haid | Dec 11, 2023
they are, from what I’m learning and what I see, different,” he says. “But I didn’t have to change. That was what I was learning and what I was trained for, so there was no difference for me.” Sgt. Rainey started in the unit in 2007 as an Investigator, and was then promoted to Master Deputy before his current role as Sergeant in 2017. He focuses on computer forensic battery recovery and forensic work, but even so, is always impressed by Queue’s work. Queue was donated to the Greenville County Sheriff’s office by Defenders for Children, and she was the first dog to be donated to an ICAC unit to be used in this way. A lot was riding on her performance: these K-9s are donated, so in order to get people to raise money to add more dogs to police units, Queue’s ability to help solve cases mattered.
Photo by Krista Sutherland
Just when you think that you’ve grasped all of the incredible things that dogs can do, you’re met with another incredible story, like “Queue,” the 6-year-old electronic detection K-9 Labrador Retriever. She helps the Greenville County Sheriff’s Office in South Carolina convict child abusers and traffickers as part of the Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) unit — all by sniffing out hidden electronics. She’s part of the Defenders for Children program that aims to prevent child abuse, trafficking, and child pornography. Queue not only plays a crucial role in identifying electronics and hidden cameras, she’s also a huge comfort to the officers that work on heavy, often traumatic cases like these. Queue’s incredible nose and contribution to the force is what earned her the 2023 Award for Canine Excellence in the Uniformed Services K-9 category. Each year, the AKC Humane Fund awards five dogs who do extraordinary things in the service of humankind in different categories: Service Dog, Search and Rescue Dog, Therapy Dogs, Exemplary Companions, and Uniformed Service K-9s, like Queue. Dogs in this category are full-time working K-9s in the realms of city, county, state, or federal law enforcement, including the military, firefighting, customs and border patrol, and emergency services. Introducing K-9s to the ICAC Unit Queue and her handler, Sergeant Michael Rainey, who supervises the Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC) division, have been working together since 2018. Even though he’d never worked with a K-9 before, they clicked early on. He admits that he was a little nervous early on, but she received prior training before she got to him. “It all just clicked and fell into place. I didn’t have any other K-9 experience, because
Toni Clark, the Executive Director of Defenders For Children, mentioned that although conversations about catching child pornography perpetrators has increased, the statistics regarding the numbers of abused children weren’t going down. “The stats were not budging. We knew we needed to do something different. We’d never dealt with dogs, but I’ve
Photo by Krista Sutherland
always wanted to connect dogs with the children.” And so began Defenders For Children’s partnership with K-9s and police departments like Greenville’s. When they met with Sgt. Rainey, the department was dealing with close to a thousand child abuse cases a year. But Clark says Sgt. Rainey didn’t bat an eye when it came to trying a new approach. “He volunteered to take on that first dog as pretty much like a guinea pig, and go through all this training on top of his staff, which is huge.”
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