For agencies and organizations standing up a new detection program or worried theirs won't pass an audit — program development, evaluation, and selection from someone who's done the work.
K9School helps agencies and organizations build detection programs from scratch or fix ones that won't survive an audit — selection, testing, handler development, and standards-based evaluation. Guidance comes from David Latimer, a retired police chief and expert witness who has answered for programs under real scrutiny.
A structured, standards-based evaluation — not opinions. You get a clear picture and a fix-list.
We assess and build against a defined, courtroom-defensible benchmark, so improvements are measurable.
Before-and-after results from programs we've shaped.
A focused call to scope your program and its gaps.
When a detection program gets into trouble — a suppression ruling, a failed audit, a unit that quietly stops trusting its own dogs — the cause is almost never the moment it surfaced. It was set months or years earlier: a dog selected for the wrong work, a foundation rushed, a handler certified before they could read their dog, a training record that documents only successes. By the time the problem shows up in a courtroom or an inspection, it has roots. Fixing it means going back to those roots, honestly, and that is uncomfortable work most people avoid until they cannot.
David has done this from every seat — as a trainer, as a handler, as a chief of police who had to answer for a program, and as an expert witness who has seen exactly how programs come apart under scrutiny. That vantage is the point. He is not auditing your program against a binder of best practices he read once. He is evaluating it against what actually happens when a defense attorney, an inspector general, or a review board goes looking for the weak seam.
If you are creating a detection capability from scratch, the decisions you make early are the ones you will live with longest: what odors and environments you are actually equipping for, what kind of dogs fit that work, how handlers will be selected and developed, how you will test and document reliability, and how the whole thing will hold up to the oversight your organization answers to. We help you make those decisions deliberately instead of discovering them the hard way — a program designed backward from the scrutiny it will face, not forward from a catalog of dogs for sale.
If you already have a program and a nagging sense it would not survive a hard look, an honest assessment is cheaper than the ruling that would otherwise teach you the same lesson. We evaluate the real thing: how dogs are selected and maintained, whether handlers can read and articulate their dogs' behavior, whether testing is genuinely blind, and whether the training records would help you or hurt you if they were read aloud in a hearing. You get a straight account of where you stand and a prioritized path to close the gaps — measured against the same LSOC courtroom-defensible standard the rest of our work is built on.
And when a program or a case is already being challenged, David provides expert review and testimony grounded in honest evaluation. The goal is never to manufacture a defense or beat the other side; it is to tell the truth about reliability clearly enough that a court can rely on it. That is the same discipline we teach on The Method — it just happens to also be what wins the argument.
Program consulting is rarely one thing. It might be K9 selection and testing — helping you evaluate candidate dogs against the work they will actually do, so you stop buying on a demo and start buying on a defined standard. It might be handler and instructor development — building the human competence a program lives or dies on. It might be a standards-based audit that produces a straight account of where you stand, or the design of a testing regime that is genuinely blind and genuinely documented. And it might be speaking and seminars, bringing this operator-to-operator approach to your team or event. We scope it to what your program actually needs on a focused assessment call, and we quote it honestly.
What ties all of it together is the vantage point. This is not consulting from a person who read about detection programs. It is evaluation from a retired chief of police, a working detector-dog trainer since 1999, and an expert witness who has watched programs succeed and fail under the only test that ultimately counts — real scrutiny, in the real world, after the fact.
Yes. Many engagements start with an audit that produces a prioritized action list you can execute with us or on your own.
We build and evaluate to the LSOC courtroom-defensible standard and prepare teams for defensible certification.
Yes — David reviews cases and testifies as an expert witness. Every review is an honest, objective evaluation of training, records, handler influence, and reliability; the goal is the truth, not a predetermined conclusion for whoever retained him.
Both, depending on the work — selection testing and hands-on evaluation are typically on-site.
Seminars and professional speaking are $500 per presentation day, plus $200 for each travel day and reasonable expenses. Program and audit work is quoted by scope after a short assessment call.
For agencies and organizations standing up a new detection program or worried theirs won't pass an audit — program development, evaluation, and selection from someone who's done the work.