Former Hemingford Bobcat Cody Laursen is living his dream in Cass County, serving in the sheriff’s office as a K-9 handler.
Laursen graduated from Hemingford High School in 2016 and went on to Doane University, where he graduated with a Bachelor’s in Sociology, with an emphasis in Criminology and a minor in Psychology in December of 2019. He then went out into his career and started working at the Nebraska Correctional Youth Facility, with the State Department of Corrections.
“The reason I started that was that I wanted to attempt to make a change in youth lives that were incarcerated,” said Laursen.
Laursen worked there for about a year, then moved to Plattsmouth, Nebraska, where an opportunity arose: the Cass County Sheriff’s Office was hiring. Laursen applied and ran the physical test, interviewed and got offered the job. He had to go through the polygraph, and psych evaluation, a board interview and a sheriff’s interview.
He then started the academy in May 2021, which is more than 600 hours of training in Grand Island, where he graduated in August of 2021. Laursen then began the road field training officer training approximately two weeks later. Laursen excelled in the road F.T.O.
“They took me off F.T.O. early so I could cover the road about two weeks early,” said Laursen.
While Laursen was in Grand Island, the Cass County Sheriff’s K-9 handler was getting ready to leave the department, and they were going to retire the dog. In June 2021, Laursen put in a request for the K-9 handler spot.
“I knew it was going to be a long shot in the sense that I didn’t have a lot of road patrol time, and that was one of the requirements they have, but I put in for it,” said Laursen.
Laursen did his road F.T.O. and finished it, then was on road rotation for a while. Then he found out in March that he would be promoted to the K-9 handler position.
“This was a dream come true this is what I wanted to do for quite some time. I love animals. I knew I wanted to run a dog because they’re tools and what you can do with a dog is cool to see. I knew that’s what I wanted to do. I had trained my personal dogs to do your basic obedience stuff,” said Laursen.
Laursen then picked up his partner K-9 Sampson from a training group.
“I picked him up at the end of March. I had to drive from Plattsmouth to Alabama to pick up the dog from a training group down there. It was a three-day trip. I met the dog on a Wednesday. They did some training to show me the dog’s drive. That Thursday, I loaded him up and drove back,” said Laursen.
Laursen and Sampson then went to the K-9 camp in Grand Island with the Nebraska State Patrol, which was the Detector Narcotics camp. The camp was on Monday through Friday, with intense narcotics training to get Sampson up to speed.
“A lot of the dogs there had been prior trained. Sampson was a green dog and never had any order exposure or anything of that nature until we trained for approximately seven weeks with the State Patrol using the marker system,” said Laursen.
On May 9, Sampson and Laursen were certified with Nebraska for narcotic patrol.
“Nebraska’s one of the few states that have a state standard for their K-9 units that you have to have a minimum, and you have to pass certain tests to be able to be certified to run a K-9 in the state of Nebraska, which is an excellent thing in my opinion,” said Laursen
Laursen and Samson are now waiting to start tracking training to build some search and rescue ability for Sampson.
“In the meantime, we’ve hit the road of Cass County. We’ve had a couple of deployments. We haven’t had anything prosperous come out of those deployments yet, but we’re hopeful and excited to be police and hopefully help make Cass County and all the small villages and towns in the area safer,” said Laursen.