[An article by Estelle Davet – Inspector General, Head of the National Forensic Police Service (SNPS), National Police Research Center]
In January 2012, in Montceau-les-Mines (Saône-et-Loire), a masked man robbed a bank right after it opened. A few months later, another establishment in the same town was attacked using a similar modus operandi.
Investigators had surveillance videos, but the images were too blurry to formally identify the suspect. DNA, usually decisive, yielded no usable results. What remained was a subtle, almost invisible trace: the scent left in the vehicle used for the getaway. This is the trace that forensic police will exploit thanks to one of their expertise techniques: odorology, a discipline still unknown to the general public where specially trained dogs proceed with the comparison and identification of human scents. Ultimately, this expertise led to the conviction of the robber.
Dogs with unique expertise
When we think of police dogs, we usually picture units deployed in the field, mobilized in detecting explosives, narcotics, or searching for missing persons. However, behind this operational reality lies another less visible activity: that of dogs and their handlers working within the forensic police.
In France, there is a unique place called the national odorology center, which houses the only dogs capable of comparing a scent left at a crime scene with the body odor of a suspect or victim. This canine specialty, created in 2000 (by Daniel Grignon, a trained cynotechnician from Hungary), became fully operational starting in 2003.
Today, odorology relies on four agents and seven dogs (Belgian Malinois, German Shepherds, English Springer Spaniel) who, just like human experts in the lab, do not operate in the field but exclusively work within the national odorology center in Écully (near Lyon, Rhône), where they conduct scent comparisons. Two other dogs are currently in training, starting at six months old for a duration of about one year.
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