Officer Greenleaf aims to retire with K-9 championship
Officer Ken Greenleaf and K-9 Caden. Photo by Ciley Carrington
For 25 years, criminals on the run in Redondo Beach have had to contend with a fearsome duo: a 6’7 bald-headed cop by the name of Ken Greenleaf, and his even more legendary K-9 partners.
It all began in 1985. Greenleaf planned on being a school teacher but almost accidentally entered law enforcement when a stint as a reserve turned into a fulltime gig. He’d worked three years as an officer in Colorado before returning to his hometown of Redondo Beach to join the police department.
In Redondo Beach, Greenleaf was assigned a four-legged partner by the name of Boris. K-9 Boris was a very large, 115-pound German Shepherd, and Greenleaf barely knew what he was getting into when he took him on as a partner. The first challenge was just handling the leash.
“The first day I got the dog, I had to walk 30 yards across the field, I fell down,” Greenleaf recalled. “And we’re just walking straight on.”
It was the beginning of a beautiful relationship. Over the next eight years, Greenleaf and Boris would form a very successful K-9 team that would prove remarkably effective both at apprehending criminals and doing public outreach with local schoolchildren. Boris, in one instance, actually lifted a plywood cover to a crawlspace so he could get inside and catch a hiding criminal.
“One day, he caught three people,” Greenleaf said. “He had to apprehend two – or bite two – then he found a guy on the roof, and as we take him into custody and he’s handcuffed…. I’ll never forget, we turn around and he’s laying on his side, sleeping. Bites two guys, finds one and he goes crazy and then he’s sleepin’. So, when he worked, he worked, and when he really didn’t have to work, he just kicked back. He was just a funny dog. You know, kids could jump on him and pull his ears.”
By the time Boris retired in 1993, Greenleaf had established himself as an unusually effective dog handler. Some police dog handlers treat the dog as little more than a tool – when off-duty, the dog just goes into a kennel until their next shift begins. Greenleaf brought Boris into his family, and the two developed an almost seamless bond.
“The difference with me is a lot of guys will go out, send the dog, the dog runs out, finds the guy, barks or bites or does what he has to do,” Greenleaf said. “Well, with me, I want to know why’d the dog turn right here, why’d he turn left, what’d he smell. I just got into what made him work….Most handlers are not as picky as I am, because they’re policeman, and they’re probably better policeman than I am, because I like the dog stuff.”
Greenleaf has had an almost unparalleled career in that he has had five K-9 partners; most handlers are switched out after one or two dogs to give more officers the opportunity. But Greenleaf’s effectiveness – his attention to dog psychology, or what he calls “dog stuff” — made four different police chiefs assign him new dogs.
His second partner was Asko. Like all Greenleaf’s dogs, he was another German shepherd. And he was the first RBPD K-9 to be cross-trained both for “manwork” and drug searching.
“He was excellent,” Greenleaf said. “The Sheriff’s Department called us out one day and they went through this car left and right, and it took him two seconds – he jumped in the car and scratched on the back of a seat, the seat popped open, a kilo of meth fell out and a gun. He was just as amazing as Boris….He found murder suspects, he did everything you asked. He was the ugliest of the five – but he was perfect.”
Asko worked in the field seven years. And then in 2000 came perhaps the most legendary dog of them all, K-9 Basko.
Greenleaf knew that Basko was special the very first week he worked the streets. He seemed to have some special instinct – that first week he apprehended seven suspects and found a cache of drugs. One of those was a murder suspect, and the way Basko found him revealed his uncannily sharp instincts.
Greenleaf and Basko were deployed along with K-9 units fromTorrance to search for the suspect. They’d gotten ahead of the team and were waiting on a street. A “foofy” poodle-type dog was barking oddly somewhere nearby when suddenly Basko lifted his head, looked across the street, and bolted. Greenleaf made a split-second decision to trust his new dog and not call him off. Sure enough, in a backyard laundry room attached to a garage, Basko found the murder suspect.
“He was probably going to be the best dog I ever had, not because of me, but because of the instincts he had,” Greenleaf said. “He just had natural abilities.”
Basko’s time ended tragically and abruptly on a training exercise in Temecula when a supposedly puncture-proof bag of cocaine broke open in his mouth and he accidently ingested the drug. Greenleaf had made a practice of being with his dogs when they died – previously of sickness, at the vet’s office, where Greenleaf administered the injection himself – but this time it happened in the car seat rushing to the hospital.
“He just reaches over to my side of the car and kind of bites me a little bit on the arm and then he just dies,” Greenleaf said. “That was the tough part.”
Several hundred people and television news cameras showed up at a ceremony honoring Basko in front of the RBPD station.
He was a tough act to follow. But Greenleaf’s next dog, K-9 Valor, quickly became another star. Most famously, he intervened in a standoff in which a man who had threatened to kill his family was cornered by police but refused to give himself up. Police later believed he was attempting “suicide-by-cop” – trying to make them kill him – but instead Valor quickly jumped him and brought him down. The man stabbed Valor with a knife in the process, just missing his jugular vein.
All of Greenleaf’s dogs performed well in police dog competitions, but Valor won seven of the ten competitions he entered, including the 2009 World Championship K-9 Trials. Valor, though, died later that year at the age of 5. He’d always been slightly lethargic – Greenleaf noticed he’d go lay down in the back of the patrol car even right after making apprehensions – and it turned it out was because he had an incurable kidney ailment that finally caused his death.
“Valor was sick his whole life and we just didn’t know it,” Greenleaf said. “But when he worked, he worked really well.”
Officer Ken Greenleaf and K-9 Caden will compete in the police dog world championships in August. Photo by Ciley Carrington
Police Chief Joe Leonardi last year made the unusual decision to give Greenleaf another dog, even though he was nearing retirement. It was a decision that made sense in a lot of ways. Greenleaf has become perhaps the most respected dog handler in the state, and a mentor both within the RBPD and with outside agencies. He is also the face of the RBPD’s extremely successful K-9 program, which actually pays for itself – the public is so supportive that the program has received a steady stream of funding through donations, enough to pay for all the dogs.
But beyond that, neither Leonardi nor any of the superiors who dealt with Greenleaf could imagine him without a dog. It just wouldn’t have seemed right.
“I was at a dinner with [Former Chief] Mel Nichols,” Leonardi recalled. “He’d had a long career…and he told me Ken Greenleaf was by far the most impressive and skilled dog handler he’d ever known. He felt really strongly that I should consider that, and Ken should definitely get another dog. And it was indisputable – every dog Ken had became proficient to the highest degree, both in man work and in search work. All of his dogs were excellent both in field and in competition.”
“All of his dogs have been great, but Greenleaf has been the common denominator,” said Councilman Steve Aspel, a close friend of Greenleaf’s who first met him when the officer and his dog showed up two decades ago in his backyard searching for a criminal. “He’s probably the best dog handler in the world.”
RBPD Officer Corey King, who first became a dog handler three years ago, credits Greenleaf for helping build a strong K-9 program and for teaching him to always go back to the “basics” – essentially, to know your dog, and always keep the your dog fully in control.
“You know, those are big shoes to fill, but I want to continue the tradition of Redondo Beach’s K-9’s,” King said. “I want to keep it going.”
Greenleaf said one of the keys to dog handling is realizing what a dog needs.
“Dogs want direction, and you have to be fair with the dog,” Greenleaf said. “So if you don’t give them direction, they aren’t going to respond to you, and when the dog reacts, you have to counter-react, either with positive behavior or negative behavior. Most dog handlers can’t do that, to be honest….It should be more of parent-child relationship than a friend relationship. Most dogs don’t respond to a more friendly relationship.”
The RBPD will keep three handlers in the field. Leonardi noted that it’s a demanding job – basically, 24/7, always training, working, or caring for the dog – and said that one new dog handler who was young and extremely fit admitted that Greenleaf’s regiment was “one of the most difficult things he’s ever done.”
But Aspel stressed that his friend was also “a big cupcake.”
“He looks so big and tough and mean, but you go to his house and he has Disney posters on every wall,” Aspel said. “He’s a Disney freak. I went to Disneyland with him and my kids one time and as soon as you enter the park he’s running around like a kid – he knows every ride, knows every wait time….So yeah, he’s a tough guy, but a lot of people misunderstand him – he’s really just a big cupcake. He’s a really good guy.”
Greenleaf will end his career in late August with a final trip to the World Championships with his newest dog, K-9 Caden. Greenleaf is raising money to travel to the event, in New York City. Donations will help pay for airfare and hotel costs and money left over will be go into the Redondo Beach K-9 Fund and help cover the cost for the city’s next dog. Greenleaf will retire with Caden on Sept. 2. Donations can be made to the Redondo Beach K-9 Fund in Greenleaf’s name at the Redondo Beach police station, 401 Diamond St.