Partner remembers K-9 Officer Riggs’ career of catching bad guys and having fun 

Riggs was a little over a year old when he and Scott Mittelstadt became partners in February 2014.

“He was wild and crazy and full of energy, and I didn’t know what I had on my hands,” Mittelstadt said of the German shepherd that would be part of his life for the next 10 years.

Mittelstadt, now a sergeant in the Eden Prairie Police Department’s (EPPD) support operations division, had no experience working with police dogs before he started working with Riggs. The pair headed off to K-9 school a month after Riggs arrived.

“I had zero training at that point,” he said. “So over the course of three months, I learned how to work him at being a K-9, and he learned how to be a K-9, so we kind of learned together how to do our jobs.”

They did those jobs together for five years before K-9 Officer Riggs retired in 2019.

Riggs died May 3 at the age of 11.

Vilo to Riggs

Riggs was called Vilo when he met Mittelstadt.

“I renamed him Riggs because I was a big fan of the movie ‘Lethal Weapon,’ and I really liked the name Riggs,” Mittelstadt said of one of the movie’s main characters. “When I met Riggs for the first time, he was super lean and wild, just like Mel Gibson’s character, so I thought the name was a perfect fit.”

Riggs came to Eden Prairie from a working dog training center in Slovakia. “They have strict breeding guidelines, and they have worked with dogs for years,” Mittelstadt said. “So they know (when) a dog has good genes, good mechanics that would be suited for a life in law enforcement. I’m not sure what kind of crystal ball they looked into to assign Riggs to Eden Prairie. But that’s how our story came together.”

Mittelstadt had always assumed a police dog was aggressive and vicious.

“I learned quickly that they’re not,” he said. “They are just out there doing their job, and their job is to find bad guys, or, actually, find people – we found a lot of people that we were looking for that weren’t bad guys – and detect narcotics for us.”

Riggs was good at his job, but was the antithesis of the vicious police dog stereotype. 

“(Riggs) was actually a very sweet-tempered boy,” Mittelstadt said. “He was very friendly around kids. We did lots of public demonstrations with children, and all of them wanted to come up and meet Riggs.” 

Early on, Mittelstadt wasn’t quite sure what kind of dog he was working with. “But the more I did, I realized that he was not aggressive towards kids, not aggressive to other dogs,” he said. “Basically, the only thing he wanted to do was chase his ball.”

Riggs’ reward for doing his job – or doing most anything else – was his ball. 

“And he did whatever I asked of him, just as long as he got a ball at the end of it,” Mittelstadt said. “I knew that his reward – his drive – was that ball. In K-9 training, the dog is either rewarded with praise, food or a toy. I learned right off the bat that Riggs would do anything for his toy. He loved Kong balls. He loved lacrosse balls, anything hard rubber and thrown, he was all in. So I would make him jump over hurdles, climb over walls, climb through tunnels.” 

Tracking human odor

Lots of dogs love to chase a ball. But Riggs was being trained for something much different than most dogs. 

To get his ball, Riggs would work in an environment that was stressful and potentially dangerous.

“Once he figured out what he was supposed to be doing, he did it for me and I rewarded him with a ball,” he said. “And that was our relationship; that was his drive.”

When Riggs jumped out of the squad car, he didn’t know what he was going to be doing. “He looked for me for directions,” Mittelstadt said. “If I was taking him out of the car to track, I would generally put his tracking harness on and that kind of locked in his mindset that ‘OK, I’m going to be nose to the ground, pulling towards human odor.’” 

So, Riggs was no nonsense, all business when at work, right?

“It was all play,” Mittelstadt said. “He didn’t know the difference between work and play. It was all just fun for him. He knew the game, and he didn’t know if that person behind the door was an actual suspect that we’re looking for or just a partner playing a game. He didn’t really care. He knew that human odor meant barking, which meant he gets rewarded.”

Riggs could read Mittelstadt when things got more serious. “He sensed it in me,” he said. “I think because the stress I conveyed or excitement in my voice, if I’m yelling at somebody to get them to comply, he sensed that excitement in my voice so he would do his big-boy bark.” 

Early on, Mittelstadt and Riggs were called to the scene of a robbery at Walgreens where a suspect with a gun had fled from police. 

“As officers were pursuing him, the guy threw the gun, and so Riggs and I get called there, and the bad guy is in custody,” he said. “However, the evidence still needs to be found.” 

At this point, Mittelstadt still wasn’t sure of his relationship with Riggs and what his capabilities were. 

“So I get him out of the car. I give him the command to start looking for evidence,” he said. “And he’s nose to the ground tracking through the woods and then he just stops, stares down at the ground and he stares back at me.”

Riggs was trained to lay down when he found something, but he just stopped, so Mittelstadt wasn’t sure what was happening. 

“He seemed to be just as confused as I was, but he stopped, looked at it, looked at me. So then I go up to see what he had, and, sure enough, he found the gun. I was impressed.” 

Riggs found his first human the first winter he and Mittelstadt worked together.

An EPPD officer attempted to stop a stolen vehicle and the driver fled on foot after crashing the vehicle on an icy road.

“So a perimeter gets set up. Riggs and I get there and I grab another officer to come with me and we start tracking,” Mittelstadt said. “At first, it’s easy because I’m able to track the footprints in the snow.” 

They lost the tracks when they arrived at a street but continued their search, hoping Riggs could pick up the suspect’s odor. “We keep trying and trying, and I’m getting nothing out of him,” he said.

As they began walking back to the squad car thinking the suspect got away, Riggs had other ideas. 

“Riggs starts pulling me to the backyard of a house,” Mittelstadt said. Riggs led him to a fenced-in backyard. “He pulls me to the gate and he wants to go in there. 

“So, they always say, ‘Trust your dog.’”

Mittelstadt called for extra officers and released Riggs in the backyard. He immediately headed for the space below the home’s deck. 

“He’s just circling around, circling around,” he said. “He’s excited. I can tell he’s in odor. So, he pulls me up the stairs of the deck and he’s still pretty excited. Then I see feet sticking out from under a grill.

“We start yelling commands to the person and Riggs starts barking. He had a pretty ferocious bark.” 

The suspect wanted nothing to do with Riggs and quickly gave himself up. 

“This was one of those times where it just reinforces that all this time and training that you do, that this dog is capable of doing what he was trained for and you get the same sense of pride in your dog’s success that you have when your child succeeds,” Mittelstadt said.

Wear and tear 

K-9 officers typically serve for about five years, Mittelstadt said.  

“We like the officer to work five years with the dog just because there’s so much time, money and energy going into training the dog, they want to make sure it’s worth it,” he said. 

In 2019, Mittelstadt sensed changes in his partner.

“I could tell going into the fifth year that Riggs was slowing down a little bit,” Mittelstadt said. “He didn’t bound into the backseat of the car as easily. So I knew that his working career was coming to an end.” 

When Mittelstadt was promoted to sergeant, he decided he had to retire Riggs. “He may have been able to go an extra year, but I wouldn’t have pushed him much past that,” he said.

“There’s a lot of wear and tear. They have to recertify every year and that involves a lot of jumping, a lot of binding, a lot of obedience. That all equals wear and tear on the dog.”

Riggs, the family dog 

Riggs lived with the Mittelstadt family from the day he arrived until the day he died. 

“Riggs started as an outdoor dog in my house,” Mittelstadt said. K-9 instructors encourage officers to have an outside run with a dog house for their K-9 so they’re acclimated to the weather. 

“For maybe the first year, I did that,” he said. “I had him in the backyard. And then one winter, there was a very cold snap. So I decided to bring him in just for his own health and welfare. And at the time, I had a young daughter. I also had another house dog, and Riggs got along with them great.” 

When the weather warmed, Mittelstadt tried to put Riggs back outside. 

“He wouldn’t have it,” he said with a smile. “He was just whining and barking back there. He was upset. It was like he was saying, ‘Hey, how come you’re just throwing me back out here?’ So, I felt guilty and I brought him back into the house and that’s where he stayed.”

Even retired, Riggs rarely took his eyes off Mittelstadt, seemingly awaiting the next adventure. 

“He got a little anxious the first month or so when he saw me go to work without him,” he said. Mittelstadt started going to work in plain clothes and changing into his uniform at work. 

“But if I ever had to gear up at the house, he would get really excited like ‘Alright, let’s go to work!’”

When Riggs was working, he had a bed in Mittelstadt’s bedroom. He would shadow his human partner around the house. “If I was in the kitchen, he’d be lying in the living room facing me,” Mittelstadt said. “He did that into retirement as well. Wherever I went, he followed.”

Riggs had free run outside and he never wandered off.

“He didn’t care to,” Mittelstadt said. “He liked being at home. He liked being around family. So that’s where he stayed.”

Riggs was a favorite with the neighbor kids. “He was a big, intimidating-looking dog, but he was harmless with the kids,” he said.

Eventually, Riggs body began to give out.

“I knew that he was getting weaker and weaker, that steps were becoming a problem for him,” Mittelstadt said. 

Riggs still liked going for walks. “But when the day came that I wanted to take him for a walk, and he stopped and wanted to go back to the house, I knew that it was causing him too much pain,” he said.

Mittelstadt saw that Riggs wasn’t able to do the things he wanted to do anymore. “Sometimes at home, he wasn’t able to get back up on his own, and that’s not fair to him,” Mittelstadt said. “He’s worked hard in his career, and it was a very difficult decision to make.” 

The family talked about next steps. They were especially concerned about preparing their 11-year-old daughter, who had grown up with Riggs. Mittelstadt said they agreed that “Riggs’ story is going to be coming to an end, unfortunately. It was tough.”

‘This was his domain’ 

In his final months, Mittelstadt would bring Riggs to the police department every now and again. “We have a nice place where I can give him a bath and let people see the old man again,” he said. “And whenever he came to the office, it brought a bit of a spark back to him. He would prance a little bit more. This was his domain.” 

And those people remembered Riggs on the day he retired and on the day he died. His portrait is displayed in the entryway of the department, along with those of his colleagues, past and present.

“This is where he came to play,” Mittelstadt said of the department. There was always somebody ready to throw him his ball. 

“A lot of officers say they remember Riggs putting his ball on top of the table at roll call and it would just roll across the table, leaving a trail of slobber behind it. 

“He just wanted somebody to ‘Please throw this ball for me,’” Mittelstadt said.

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Eden Prairie Police currently has two K-9 officers – K-9 Gus with Officer Nate Eichman and K-9 Jax with Officer Brandon Carlston.