Minnesota BCA welcomes new member to its team

ST. PAUL, Minn. (KEYC) — The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension welcomed its newest member to the team Wednesday.

Sota, a two-year-old black British Labrador, is trained to locate electronic evidence, such as USB drives, cell phones and micro SD cards. In fact, she’s the first electronic detection K-9 in Minnesota.

Training dogs as electronic detection K-9s is a relatively new practice – just two years ago there were only three such K-9s in the country, but now there are about three dozen.

Sota locates evidence by sniffing out chemical coatings on all memory storage chips found in electronic devices.