Monkey Bussiness

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Thursday, April 21. 2005

SWAT idea takes a swing at crime

By Kristina Davis, Tribune
April 16, 2005

The Mesa SWAT team wants a monkey in its ranks.
Dressed in a Kevlar vest, video camera and two-way radio, the small monkey would be able to get into places no officer or robot could go.
With its tiny humanlike hands and puzzle-solving skills, it could unlock doors, search buildings and find suicide victims on command.

It is what officer Sean Truelove envisions as the ultimate SWAT reconnaissance tool.

Truelove is now seeking federal grant money, about $100,000, to put the idea to use in Mesa SWAT operations.

It has been a little over a year since he filed a grant proposal with the U.S. Department of Defense under the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and he is still waiting for word.

The idea is admittedly outlandish.

"Everybody laughs about it until they really start thinking about it," said Truelove, who builds and operates the SWAT team’s tactical robots. "It would change the way we do business."

Truelove proposes training a $15,000 capuchin monkey, which is considered the second smartest primate to the chimpanzee and weighs only 3 to 8 pounds.

Since 1979, the monkeys have been trained to be companions for people who are quadriplegics by performing daily tasks, such as serving food, opening and closing doors, turning lights on and off, retrieving objects and brushing hair.

Truelove hopes the same training could prepare a monkey for special-ops intelligence. It could be sent up a second-floor balcony or through a window to unlock the front door. It could squeeze in crawl spaces and through attic rafters to find a barricaded suspect.

Gloves for its hands and feet would protect it from broken glass. An attached video camera would serve as the team’s eyes and ears and transmit life-saving information back to officers before they decide to burst in.

But it took a while for the SWAT guys to get past the chuckle factor.

"Now at every call-out we say, ‘We could’ve used the monkey on this,’ " Truelove said.

He knows animal rights activists may not embrace the idea.

"You have to put things into perspective. Are we going to stop using an animal in this manner to save several lives?" he said. "We’re not going to put it into a position where it would get injured. It would be utilized as a K-9. We don’t send it in if we know there’s other animals in the house, or if the threat level is too high."

In fact, the shock value alone might save the monkey if it ever faced an armed suspect, he said.

"Would (a suspect) really believe what he was seeing? I’ve never had a suspect grab the robot, shoot or touch the robot. At the same end, I’d think he wouldn’t shoot an animal. He’d be quite stunned to see a monkey there. And the monkey would have an egress plan — get out the same way he came," he said.

The idea actually came to Truelove in a dream 18 months ago. His wife called him crazy.

"The more I thought about it, the more it made sense," he said.

If the grant goes through, Truelove plans on learning how to train the monkey himself and keeping the sociable monkey at home, just like a K-9 officer would. He projects that $85,000 in grant money would outfit the monkey with gear and pay for veterinarian care, food and habitat for three years.

"My biggest roadblock is all of the unknowns," he said. "There’s a lot of hypotheses there. People don’t like unknowns."

Monkey facts
Closer look: Here are some facts about the capuchin monkey, which the Mesa SWAT team hopes to add to its unit:

• Lives up to 40 years

• Very sociable

• Most intelligent of New World monkeys

• Come from the South American rain forest

• Can jump 10 to 13 feet

• Eats nuts, fruit and insects

From the East Vally Tribune