ERVING — Laura Gordon feels her time in law enforcement has been marked by a passion for people and dogs.
Gordon, 55, retired on Friday, Oct. 10, after 33 years in law enforcement, including three and a half years with the Erving Police Department as a patrol and K-9 officer with her partner Ziva, a 4-year-old bloodhound. Before joining Erving, she was an officer in Sunderland, with the University of Massachusetts Amherst and, most recently, Greenfield, where she worked for 24 years. She leaves her career with plans to spend time with family and continue volunteering with Northeast Houndsmen, a North Quabbin-based nonprofit dedicated to training police dogs and bringing canines to local departments.
Gordon said her family always knew she’d go into law enforcement since she was young, and once she entered the field in the 1990s, she knew she wanted to be a K-9 officer.
“I think working with the dogs just bolstered that,” Gordon said when asked about how her experience with comfort dogs influenced her passion for community-centered law enforcement. “That’s really what my passion was, and I was lucky enough to have agencies that let me run with it.”
Comfort dogs
This desire manifested years later in her private life when she and her husband, now-retired Greenfield Deputy Police Chief William Gordon, started working nationally with their two Saint Bernards, Rosie and Clarence, who picked up on moments when William Gordon would experience symptoms of post-traumatic stress.
After training the two dogs, they would respond with them to traumatic incidents across the United States to provide comfort to first responders when requested. This included deployments to the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, the Las Vegas shooting during the Route 91 Harvest music festival in 2017 and the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh in 2018. These responses garnered the dogs national attention, and the Greenfield Police Department was able to start its own comfort dog program in 2018.
Before these deployments, the first incident their dogs responded to was in December 2012 at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, where 20 children and six adults were shot inside the school by a lone gunman. Rosie and Clarence stayed in the town for a few days afterward to meet with first responders, members of the news media and people at the memorial sites.
“We walked in with Rosie and Clarence, went into this room, and it’s like they sought out the individuals that needed them the most,” Laura Gordon recalled.
Gordon said she would never forget one interaction where a woman, after visiting with the dogs, asked how to move forward after such an incident. Then, a spontaneous singing of “Silent Night” started in the surrounding crowd.
“We were kind of like, ‘This is how’ — all join together, and you come together and support one another,” she said. “I’ll never forget that. I can talk about my dogs forever.”
Doing what she does naturally
Gordon has maintained her passion for comfort dogs and explored another avenue for this through the Erving Police Department. She joined the department in 2022.
Gordon and Erving Police Chief Robert Holst discussed reviving the town’s K-9 program as she learned about the breed by working with Northeast Houndsmen.
“I was doing that on my own when the town decided that yes, they wanted to go forward with the bloodhound program,” she explained.
Ziva is one of the regional K-9 assets in Franklin County, and Gordon said they have responded to calls in Hampshire, Hampden and Worcester counties as well. These have included Ziva tracking down lost people, including children and the elderly.
Ziva has also been involved in community building in Erving and regionally, attending community and law enforcement events. Gordon said she’s been thankful to have Ziva both as a law enforcement asset and as a dog naturally inclined toward people. Ziva, she added, can be a source of calm in a moment of need.
In reflecting on 33 years in law enforcement, Gordon sees her impact as coming through policing, comfort dogs and Ziva.
“A lot of my trainers laugh at me, because usually when we’re training or actually on deployment, sometimes they’ll see me behind her with a big smile on my face,” Gordon said with a laugh. “And that’s because I just purely love watching the dogs do what they do naturally.”