Officer Heidi Keeps The Peace

A distress call came in from a medical office: A patient was getting ​“vocal.” They needed help.

Specifically, they needed the newest deescalation cop on the force.

Yale police received the call in question during the daytime A shift. It came from the Yale Health Plan.

The requested cop, Heidi, was on duty. And ready to help.

Heidi (street aliases ​“Heidi-ho” and ​“Sweet Girl”) is a 2‑year-old Labrador Retriever with 10,000 hours under her color-shifting collar training as a service and comfort dog primed to calm humans in stressful situations. She is also a pathbreaker and emerging social media star: She is the first officer of her type at an Ivy League university, one of the first in a new breed of canine cops coming onto forces nationwide as part of efforts to transform policing.

Accompanied by her human handler, Officer Rich Simons, Heidi arrived at the health office where the ​“vocal” patient was having a mental-health moment that threatened to get out of hand.

The patient was wheeling himself out of an office when he spotted Heidi.

“I love Labradors,” he exclaimed.

Heidi stayed with the patient throughout the visit, which proceeded with no problem.

Heidi has been helping campus cops keep the peace since joining the force last September, amid the worst public health crisis in over a century as well as a nationwide reckoning over how police do their jobs.

The timing was fortuitous.

She became a regular — by request — at vaccination sites, accompanying fretful shot recipients and easing tension for staffers. Stressed students greeted her on her daily rounds, played fetch, sometimes contacted the PD for a canine visit to ease exam-studying nerves. ​“Where’s Heidi?” people would ask between visits at the medical or business school.

The cops themselves came to count on encounters with Heidi.

Capt. Von Narcisse, for instance, looks for his daily glance at of ​“that unjudging face” and chance to give Heidi a tap on the head.

“She doesn’t care who’s mad at you. She loves everybody. She’s family,” Narcisse reflected. ​“She makes a difference everywhere she goes.”

Pup Policing

Hiring Heidi was Rich Simons’ idea.

He nurtured the idea for 28 years, since his first six months as a rookie cop on campus. Simons was assigned to patrol Saybrook College. He decided to bring Bonnie and Clyde, sibling Rottweiler pups from home, with him. ​“It was an olive branch,” he recalled. Students loved playing fetch with the pups, putting the dogs on their laps. ​“A lot of kids talked about how they missed their dog.”

Simons moved on to other assignments, including a 14-year stint as Yale police union president. He’d periodically float the idea of adding service dogs to the beat — not bomb-sniffing or crowd-control canines, just friendly pups who make people feel good. The idea didn’t catch on with the department brass.

Until Simons pitched it to Chief Ronnell Higgins and Assistant Chief Anthony Campbell, who joined the force in 2019. Seeing the idea as a good fit with a community-policing and ​“community wellness” strategy for the department, they encouraged Simons to make it happen.

So he started doing research. It turned out a trained service dog would cost tens of thousands of dollars. That was tens of thousands of dollars more than he had to spend.

Then he discovered Puppies Behind Bars. PBB trains prison inmates to train specially selected Labrador Retrievers to help wounded military vets and work with first responders and cops. And it gives police departments the trained service dogs for free.

Yale PD and PBB signed on. PBB chose Heidi, a 50-pound yellow rescue Labrador Retriever. Heidi underwent the 10,000 hours of socialization training over 14 months.

Then it was Simons’ turn: He spent 12 days along with an FBI agent, a New York City cop, and a Massachusetts cop at a morning-to-night dog-handler training run in New York by female inmates involved in the program. (Simons won ​“best able to read dog language” in the class.)

“Yale is in the vanguard” as the first Ivy League police department to take on a service dog, said PBB founder Gloria Gilbert Stoga. Four municipal police departments in Connecticut — in Naugatuck, Middletown, Simsbury, and Waterford — have added service dogs as well. A new class of six cops is currently training with PBB, with many more expected as the idea catches on to address new police-community challenges and stress cops face on the job, Stoga said.

Ofc. Smiles

Simons and Heidi began walking the A Squad beat at Yale in September. They were a quick hit, dropping in on students, hanging out at Claire’s Corner Copia, making rounds of medical officers and day care centers, and of course responding to calming requests like the one the other day involving the patient at the health plan.

“Her job is to bring smiles. She oozes love. She’s always happy, always wants to see people,” Simons said.

Assistant Chief Campbell said Heidi’s work fits into the department’s community-policing mission. And comes at an important transitional moment, in the wake of the past year’s police-accountability protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd.

Dogs have more traditionally been used for sniffing out bombs or controlling unruly crowds, neither of which Heidi is trained to do. The state police unleashed a vicious canine that attacked unarmed protesters in New Haven. Since the past century, attack police dogs have had a particularly unsettling image in Black communities.

“It helps, especially in a post-George Floyd world, to connect to the community,” Campbell said. ​“We want to change the perception of what people should expect when they encounter police. And we’re changing the perception of what dogs are in this department and how they’re used.”

“Heidi is beloved,” Campbell noted, adding that he ​“spent some time” being comforted by her recently after his brother was shot to death. The demand for visits from Heidi were ​“through the roof” among students, faculty, and staffers in the wake of the recent suicide of an undergraduate, he added. ​“Everyone was hurting. People wanted not necessarily to sit and talk with someone, but just have some form of comfort, some way of connecting with a living creature, putting their sorrow and pain on Heidi.”

“Everyone loves it when Heidi comes by,” Kerri Merritt, who works in the Yale Health pediatrics department, said when she ran into Simons and partner on their daily campus rounds Tuesday. ​“Heidi makes everybody smile.”

As Heidi’s fame has spread — her Instagram following has soared since March, from 430 to topping 1,800 this week — Simons has heard from other departments, academic and municipal, looking to enlist their own four-legged patrollers. Princeton just called for advice. So did Houston, Texas.

Meanwhile, ​“Team Heidi” stickers are coming hot off the presses, destined to decorate Yale students’ laptops.

And Simons, who’s 58, exudes the enthusiasm of a rookie as he takes his partner on her rounds, imbued with a sense of mission. ​“My goal is to make one person happy a week. I get to do it several times a day,” he said. ​“Covid-19 has made people afraid. Heidi’s and my job is to help people have a better day.” You can now count that as an official task of policing, at least on one beat in New Haven.