Los Angeles Police Department

The Los Angeles Police Department enters A Boy and His Dog not as a present-day force but as a remembered institution from before the Third War, preserved in the rote story Blood tells Vic. According to that account, over sixty-five years before the novel's present, in Los Angeles, a man named Buesing who lived in Cerritos raised dogs as watchmen, sentries, and attackers. Among his dogs was a four-year-old German shepherd bitch named Ginger, who worked for the Los Angeles Police Department's narcotics division. Her specialty was smelling out marijuana, and no matter how well the drug was hidden, she could find it. The department ran a test on her: in an auto parts warehouse containing 25,000 boxes, five had been planted with marijuana sealed in cellophane, wrapped in tin foil and heavy brown paper, and finally hidden in three separate sealed cartons. Within seven minutes, Ginger found all five packages. This test is the story's first concrete demonstration of canine capability, and it establishes the Los Angeles Police Department as the institutional setting where that capability was first put to official use.